#camille desmoulins mention

[livelaughlovelams]

WAIT GUYS I'M ACTUALLY TWEAKING RN I WAS JUST AT SPEECH THERAPY AND YK DOING ALL MY STUTTERING THINGS BUT LIKE EVERY TIME I STUTTERED OR HAD A BLOCK STUTTER AND WE DID LIKE FLUENCY STRATEGIES, AFTER DOING THE STRATEGIES FOR A BIT, EVERY SINGLE TIME, I ACTUALLY EVENTUALLY GOT EVERY SINGLE WORD OUT!? LIKE WHAAAAAAAAAT!?! LIKE I COULD ACTUALLY TALK?!?! Y'ALL HONESTLY DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW DEEP THIS IS, I'VE HAD A SEVERE STUTTER SINCE I COULD TALK AND THIS IS ACTUALLY SO COOL REEEEEEE THERE ARE LITERAL TEARS IN MY EYES AND NOW I FEEL LIKE DESMOULINS AT THE BASTILLE AND I ASSURE YOU HE FELT THE EXACT SAME WAY BECAUSE OMG WHAaaATTTTTTATATATATAAT!?!?!?¡¡!¡!¡!¡!

[blufishzzz]

Guys hear me out on my ghost Camille AU-

I had this idea in my mind for about some time now, where basically Camille comes back (in ghost form) after his death and haunts Maxime. It was very interesting to me how the Terror become much worse after Camille’s execution, and I always viewed it as the cause of his death(at least, one of the reasons). And I thought it would be quite interesting to make an AU out of it:)! Feel free to add anything onto this original idea of mine, I’ll be very happy to see your take on this!

[enlitment]

Rare footage of the French Revolutionaries desperately trying to upheld the Revolution's ideals with their writing:

[braucherei]

Almost out of nowhere Roland spends 3 pages describing her body, face, accomplishments etc. only for it to be lead up to Camille slander lol

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Hi! A lot has already been written about Robespierre's relationship with both Camille and Saint-Just, but I would be really curious to learn more about his relationship with Pétion that you've mentioned!

Specifically if there is any evidence that we know of that indicates any strong feelings or possible romantic involvement. I'd also be interested to know how their relationship transformed over time, since they ultimately ended up on opposing sides?

Thank you in advance citoyen!

Pétion and Robespierre met for the very first time after the convening of the Estates General in May 1789 to which both had been elected members, Pétion in March, Robespierre in April. Using Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, I’ve tracked the first instance of the two getting mentioned together to May 20 1789, when the journal Le Point du Jour describes a debate on the publication of municipal minutes both have taken part in:

In the debates occasioned by this motion, great talents already known, such as those of MM. Target and Mirabeau fulfilled the expectations one had created. Others, like those of MM. Barnave, Chapelier, Pétion de Villeneuve and Robespierre, manifested themselves in a striking manner.

Using the same source, along with Poursuivre la Révolution : Robespierre et ses amis à la Constituante (1994), it can be observed that Pétion and Robespierre from this moment up until the closing of the National Assembly in September 1791 fought side by side in a number of big discussions — the question of war and peace (May 16-22 1790) where both supported the motion that the Assembly alone should hold the right to declare war and king should be deprived of it, the colonies (May 11-15 1791), where both were among the 27 deputies speaking in favor of free men of color, the organisation of the national guard (27-28 april 1791), a body to which they argued both active and passive citizens should belong, the abolition of lettres de cachet (13-16 March 1790) as well as that of the silver mark and land ownership (August 1791), the non-eligibility of National Assembly deputies to the next Legislature (May 16 1791) an idea Robespierre himself had come up with, and the  question of the death penalty (May 30 1791), were both were among the rare ones to ask for its complete and total abolition. Pétion and Robespierre are found agreeing on a multitude of smaller topics as well, such as the sanction of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (October 2 1789), the treatment of bishops in office (June 22 1790), the inviolability of deputies (June 25 1790), the massacres of La Glacière (16-18 November 1790), police functions (December 28 and December 30 1790), the power of the colonial committee (January 11 1791) the organisation of the justice system (February 5 1791), the organization of administrative bodies (March 3 1791), an extradition request from the court of Vienna (March 5 1791), appointment of national treasury administrators (March 9 1791), the judgment of disputes in electoral matters (March 13 1791), the right to inheritance (April 1 1791) and the right to petition (May 9 and May 10 1791).

All these shared battles of course led to the two often getting mentioned side by side in the evergrowing press. Over the first two years of the National Assembly’s existence, these mentions mostly just consist of Pétion and Robespierre both getting listed as two of several deputies of the far left, alongside people such as Mirabeau, Barnave, Lameth, Duport, Buzot, and Grégoire. The first instance of someone describing Pétion and Robespierre as a unit while also seperating them from their fellow radical deputies that I’ve found is from December 13 1790, when Desmoulins writes the following in number 55 of his Révolutions de France et de Brabant:

One cannot speak about Robespierre without thinking about Péthion [sic]. 

This tying together of the two deputies and their cause was in the following months to do nothing but grow among the journalists. Desmoulins himself would go on to declare that ”it is only Péthion and Robespierre that I have constantly praised, because every man of good faith will agree that they have always been irreproachable” (number 69, March 21 1791) and that ”we must always come back […] to the system of Robespierre and Péthion: perish the colonies, rather than the principles!” (number 77, May 16 1791). In��number 472 (May 28 1791) of of l’Ami du Peuple, Marat describes the National Assembly as consisting of ”two hundred men too narrow-minded to know what they are, and one or two honest men who have never wanted anything other than the general good. Such are Péthion [sic] and especially Robespierre,” and three days later, in number 475, he reveals that ”If I were tribune of the people […] I would give Péthion [sic] and especially Robespierre a civic crown.” In number 783(October 2 1791) of Le Patriote Français, Brissot called Pétion and Robespierre ”the two Catos of the Constituent” and a few days later Louis Marie Prudhomme expressed himself in similar terms, writing ”Péthion [sic], Robespierre and the small group of their like, did not fail to embarrass their adversaries so powerful in number and means: more than once their presence reminded that of Cato to the licentious spectators of Rome” (Révolutions de Paris, number 117). 

The image of the two as inseparable was even stronger in the different Jacobin clubs scattered across the land. On April 17 1791 it was discovered that one of them had placed busts of Pétion and Robespierre next to that of the recently deceased Mirabeau, contrary to the rule that no busts of living people would be displayed in the clubs. On July 13 1791, one M. Sigaud read a letter to the parisian Jacobin club signed by 300 people wanting to ”give thanks to MM. Pétion and Robespierre, for having announced the greatest courage in the defense of the people. They will threaten you with daggers, with death: fear nothing, their daggers will only be able to penetrate you through the rampart of our bodies. Our arms, our hearts, our lives, everything is yours.” Two weeks after that, July 25 1791 Tallien exclaimed to the same club that ”Where Pétion and Robespierre are, are the true friends of the Constitution,” and three months later, October 10 1791, he held a speech where he said that ”the names of Pétion, of Robespierre, and of of those who, like them, have well served their fatherland, must be the rallying sign of all patriots; we always see them on the path of honor, and, by following in their footsteps, we are sure not to go astray.” On April 30 1792, Simond told the jacobins that ”MM Pétion and Robespierre” were the best revolutionaires, ”because there are no individuals who have figured like them in our revolutionary splendors.” In Nouveau Tableau de Paris (1797), Louis Sebastien Mercier remembered how Pétion had been the ”inseparable friend of Robespierre, their principles were then so consistent and their intimacy so marked, that they were called the two fingers of the hand. They continued to be placed under the same accolade until the end of 1792,” while Robespierre’s sister Charlotte wrote in her memoirs (1834) that her brother during the National Assembly ”was closest with Pétion, whose popularity then equaled his. They […] fought for the cause of the people, like two generous imitators who looked to surpass each other in noble sentiments.”

In spite of all this, it’s not until December 1790 I’ve been able to for the first time find Pétion and Robespierre together with a backdrop that’s not political, as they on the 25th and 27th of that month signed the wedding contract and attended the wedding ceremony of Camille and Lucile Desmoulins, Camille reporting to his father that ”I had as witnesses Péthion [sic] and Robespierre, the elite of the National Assembly, Sillery, who wanted to be there, and my two colleagues Brissot de Warwille and Mercier, the elite among the journalists. […] The dinner was at my house, only M. and Mdm Duplessis, their daughter Adèle, the witnesses and the celebrant.” Two months later, March 3 1791, Sillery writes to the same Camille that ”Madame de Sillery is coming to dine at my house with Pétion and Robespierre, I dare to ask your lovable and beautiful wife to do me this honor as well.” Yet another month later, April 3 1791, Robespierre made the motion that the recently deceased Mirabeau be buried in the Panthéon. In his memoirs (written 1793), Brissot claimed that ”Pétion reproached [Robespierre] for it the same day, he reproached him for it in my presence.” According to number 72 of Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Pétion was indeed the only deputy that didn’t attend Mirabeau’s funeral on April 5 1791. Finally, in 1850, Louis Philippe told John Wilson Croker that he at some point during the National Assembly had been at a dinner where the two deputies where — ”Pétion was big and fat, good-humoured and talkative, but heavy withal. He talked on, Robespierre said not a word, and I took little notice of him, he looked like a cat lapping vinegar. Pétion was rallying him on being so taciturn and farouche, and said they must find him a wife to apprivoiser him: upon which Robespierre opened his mouth for the first and last time with a kind of scream, ”I will never marry!” (The Croker Papers: the Correspondence and Diaries of the late right honourable John Wilson Croker… (1885) volume 3, page 209).

On June 10 1791, Robespierre was elected to become the future public prosecutor of the Paris criminal tribunal. Three days later, Pétion was chosen as president of the same body, after the first three elected deputies had all resigned. These new posts are the subject of the very first conserved letter exchanged between the two, dated 15 June 1791. Pétion writes the following to Robespierre using vouvoiement, the form the two are always recorded to have used with one another:

You probably know, my friend, about my appointment. I accept. I don't count having you as a colleague as something small. What scared Duport away is what attracts me. I looked for you in the hall and didn't see you. I wanted to go to your house, but I said to myself: I won't find him, he never dines at home. Buzot is a substitute and accepts. Be well, all yours.  This Wednesday evening.  Pétion.

There’s also the following letter from Pétion to Robespierre, that it too has to do with the latter’s position as public prosecutor. It is unfortunately undated, but Correspondance inédite de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre (1910) traces it to June 1791 as well:

My friend, I violate the decrees, I become solicitor. It is true that my offense is not within the competence of the assembly. I ask you in the name of my relative, my friend and my host the right to supply medicine to the poor sick prisoners. I was told that this concession was within your competence. I don’t know anything about it.  All yours.  This Friday evening. 

Just six days after Pétion had penned the first letter down, June 21, Paris woke up to the discovery that the royal family had fled the capital during the night. In number 82 of Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Desmoulins described how he and others the very same day had brought a woman with information to give about the escape to the Jacobin Club, in the hopes that her testimony would get Robespierre to denounce Lafayette and Bailly. At first, Robespierre seems quite willing to go through with this, but when Pétion shows up and shows his disapproval of the idea he is quickly taken aback:

The section immediately named a deputation of 12 members, and we took this woman to the National Assembly. Robespierre and Buzot, whom we consulted, were carried away by the assured countenance of the witness, and by the whole of the testimony; but they were greatly perplexed as to the measures to be taken. All the members of the assembly were against revolutionaries, some without knowing it, but many knowingly, and the others out of fear. We will be, they said, pushed back from the tribune, referred to the research committee, and our accusation will be entered in this mortuary register of denunciations. Péthion [sic] came, and increased the embarrassment, and stopped Robespierre, who, at first, was quite disposed to take away the reputation of Bailly and La Fayette by assault.

In her memoirs, Madame Roland claimed to the very same day have seen Brissot and Robespierre at Pétion’s house (on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré n. 6, today roughly a one hour walk from Robespierre’s apartment on rue de Saintonge 30) discussing the flight:

I was struck by the terror with which [Robespierre] seemed to be overcome on the day of the king's flight to Varennes; I found him in the afternoon at Pétion’s; where he said with concern that the royal family would not have taken this course without having a coalition in Paris which would order the Saint-Barthélemy of the patriots, and that he expected to be dead within twenty-four hours. Pétion and Brissot said, on the contrary, that the flight of the king was his loss, and that it was necessary to take advantage of it; that the dispositions of the people were excellent; that it would be better enlightened on the perfidy of the court by this approach than it would have been by the wisest of writings; that it was obvious to everyone, by this fact alone, that the king did not want the constitution he had sworn to; that it was time to ensure a more homogeneous one, and that it was necessary to prepare minds for the Republic. Robespierre, sneering as usual and biting his nails, asked what a Republic was!

In the night between June 21 and 22 the royal family was stopped in Varennes, and four o’clock the next morning, Pétion, alongside Barnave and Maubourg, left the capital to escort them back. They reached Paris again on June 25. The escape attempt resulted in massive discontentment and demands that the king abdicate. On July 15, a petition written by a certain Massoulard, asking the assembly to suspend “all determination on the fate of Louis XVI until the well-pronounced wish of the entire Empire has been expressed” was brought to the National Assembly. In Lettre de J. Pétion à ses Commettans sur les Circonstances Actuelles, released later the same month, Pétion described how he and Robespierre had held these petitioners off, saying that since the Assembly had voted to keep the king on the throne the very same day, a petition was out of order:

I will say, since the occasion presents itself, that only once in this affair was a relationship established between the citizens gathered on the 15th of this month at the Champ-de-Mars and myself. These citizens had drawn up a petition for the National Assembly; commissioners carried them; they were charged with speaking to those who had risen against the project of the committees, to Grégoire, Robespierre, Prieur and myself, to be their organs with the assembly, and to negotiate their entry to the bar. M. Robespierre and I left the room to listen to these commissioners; and we told them that this petition was useless, that the decree [to keep the king on the throne] had just been passed. They asked us for a word to see that they had fulfilled their mission; we wrote a letter which breathes the love of order, of peace, and which, I believe, has been able to prevent misfortunes. 

When Pétion, Robespierre and Rœderer entered the Jacobin club’s evening session the very same day they got covered in applause. Both were there again on both July 16, putting their signatures on a letter to the sister societies in the provinces about liberty of the press and the elections for the upcoming Legislative Assembly, as well as on July 17 and 18, this time dealing with the mass walkout (that left the two and a handful more as the only National Assembly deputies still members of the Jacobins) following the founding of the Feuillants club the previous day. Desmoulins, who was also present at the session on the 17th, stated that he didn’t want any writing to say the Jacobins were splitting from the National Assembly since, ”certainly, where MM. Robespierre and Pétion are, there is no split with the National Assembly.”

Pétion would later recall how afraid Robespierre had been during these days. In J. P. Brissot, député à la Convention nationale, à tous les républicains de France; sur la société des Jacobins de Paris (1792) Brissot even accused Robespierre of having ”secretly proposed fleeing to Marseille to Pétion.” If that is a charge that should be taken with a grain of salt, it was nevertheless during these same days Robespierre changed address and took cover with the Duplay family on Rue Saint-Honoré 366. In her old days, the family’s youngest daughter Élisabeth claimed Pétion would frequent the house ”in the early days.” The year after the move Robespierre himself would nevertheless write that it wasn’t until August 7 1792 Pétion for the first time set his foot in the house (see below).

On September 30 1791, the National Assembly was finally closed to be replaced by the Legislative Assembly. Several journals described the triumphant exit Pétion and Robespierre made from there the very same day, getting met by cheers, applauds and cries of joy from a huge crowd who offered them so called ”civic crowns,” before the two climbed into a carriage (a ”humble” one according to Révolutions de France et de Brabant) and rode off together to the sound of fanfares. Here is the description given by Le Thermomètre du Jour:

Pétion and Robespierre came out last, arm in arm. Citizens with oak crowns tied with tricolor ribbons in their hands embraced them and said to them: ”Receive the price of your good citizenship and your incorruptibility; we give, by crowning you, the signal to posterity”; and the applause, the bravos, the shouts of ”long live Pétion and Robespierre! Long live the spotless deputies!” mingled with the chords of military music placed on the terrace of the foliage, filled all hearts with the sweetest intoxication. In vain, the two legislators wanted to hide from these testimonies of public recognition: as they fled, a young lady whom they met on the stairs which lead to the storage room said to them: ”allow at least that my child embraces you”; and this they could not resist. To escape the chorus of applause who were pursuing them, the two deputies, who had taken refuge in a house in the rue Saint-Honoré, got into a carriage. Immediately, in the delirium of enthusiasm, the horses were unhitched, and a thousand biases hastened to drag the carriage; degrading idolatry, of which those who were the object of it were afflicted and indignant. At this moment the honorable Robespierre, seized with holy indignation, hastily alighted from the carriage. “Citizens, he said, what are you doing? What humiliating posture will you take? Is this the price of my work for you for two years? Don't you already remember that you are a free people?” And he quickly got back into the carriage where his worthy colleague was. The attitude and admiration of the citizens at this moment cannot be described: sublime spectacle! You make delicious tears flow. One let the carriage roll off to the sound of fanfares, applause, cries and the most energetic blessings. May those who could have deserved such a triumph dry up in spite, comparing this excess of gratitude to the silence of contempt, or to the curses of hatred who accompanied them. Above all, may this touching example produce Pétions and Robespierres in the new legislation. 

This celebration might very well have been the follow-up of an intervention made at the Jacobin club on September 25 by one Varnet, who asked for ”a civic feast rewarded by the grateful parties to MM. Robespierre, Péthion [sic], etc, much more fraternal than all these royal celebrations which recall the ancient idolatry of the Badauds.” These would not be the homages paid to the two in the wake of the closing of the National Assembly. On October 9, the Jacobin club of Strasbourg decided to send each of the two a civic crown, as revealed in a letter with 400 signatures published in number 231 of Mercure Universel (October 17 1791). On November 6 1791, Annales patriotiques et littéraires could reveal that the club of Saint-Laron ”has informed that of Paris of the tribute of homage which it has paid to Pétion to Robespierre, and of the annual festival which it established in their honor, to teach, it said, to children that a glance from the people is better than the caresses of kings,” on October 27 the club in l’Orient reported (in a letter published in number 123 of Révolutions de Paris) that ”the names of Robespierre and Péthion [sic] are in veneration among [its members],” and on October 18 the club of Lyon sent Pétion and Robespierre an open letter thanking the two for all their services.

Shortly after the closing of the National Assembly Pétion left for London, but not before he was able to hand a report written by him on patriotic societies to Robespierre, which the latter then read to the jacobins on October 5. When Robespierre too left the capital for Arras a few days later, Pétion’s shadow clearly accompanied him. In a letter to Maurice Duplay dated October 16 he could joyfully report the following:

At Arras itself, the people received me with demonstrations of affection which I cannot describe, and the thought of which still warms my heart. Every possible means was used to express it. A crowd of citizens had come out of town to meet me. They offered a civic crown, not only to me, but to Pétion as well, and in their cheers the name of my friend and companion in arms was often mingled with my own. 

A month later, November 17, Robespierre writes to Maurice again:

…I think with sweet satisfaction about the fact that my dear Pétion may have been appointed mayor of Paris as I write. I will feel more keenly than anyone the joy that every citizen should be given by this triumph of patriotism and frank honesty over intrigue and tyranny. 

Robespierre came back to Paris on November 28. One of the first things he did was go and dine at the house of Pétion (who he here goes so far as to call his family), as revealed by a letter to Antoine Buissart he wrote two days later:

With what joy we met again! With what delight we embraced! Pétion occupies the superb house inhabited by the Crosnes, the Lenoirs: but his soul is always simple and pure: the choice of him [as mayor] alone would suffice to prove the revolution. The burden with which he is charged is immense; but I have no doubt that the love of the people and its versus gives him the necessary means to carry it. I'm having dinner at his house tonight. These are the only times when we can see each other as a family, and talk freely. 

Following Pétion’s election to mayor, his apperances in public become much fewer compared to his time as deputy of the National Assembly. Robespierre on the other hand could not get enough of praising his friend at the Jacobin club. On February 10 1792, he held a speech in which he cried out the following, apropos of suggesting holding a ceremony at the Champ-de-Mars and making a sacrifice on the altar of liberty:

O Pétion! You are worthy of this honor, worthy of deploying as much energy as wisdom in the dangers that menace the fatherland that we have defended together. Come, let us mingle our tears and weapons on the tombs of our brothers, remind ourselves of the pleasures of celestial virtue, and die tomorrow, if need be, from the blows of our common enemies. 

Five days later, in his inaugural address as public prosecutor, Robespierre called Pétion ”the one of all my colleagues to whom I was most closely bound, by works, by principles, by common perils, as much as by the ties of the most tender of friendships,” and says it was due to Pétion’s advice that he was taken aback from proposing that National Assembly deputies not only be barred from serving on the Legislative Assembly, but also be excluded from any public offices at all following the start of said assembly. He then eulogized his friend once again: ”I swear that it is he who, up until this moment, has saved the capital and prevented the horrible plans of the enemies of our liberty; I swear that the courage and virtues of Pétion were necessary for the salvation of France.” A month after that, March 19, Pétion sent the Jacobins a letter disapproving of the recent usage of the so called ”bonnet rouge” among the club’s members. After the letter had been read out, Robespierre stood up and supported his motion, and together, the two succeded in getting the bonnet rouge depositioned from the Jacobin Club:

I respect, like the mayor of Paris, all that is the image of liberty, I will even add that I saw with a great pleasure this omen of the rebirth of liberty; however; enlightened by the reflections and by the same observations made by M. Pétion, I felt urged to present to society the reasons which have just been offered to you, but as I have only patriotism to fight with, I am charmed to be guided by M. Pétion, by a citizen whose civility and love for liberty is foolproof, by a citizen whose heart is ardent and whose head is cold and thoughtful, and who brings together all the advantages, talents and virtues necessary to serve the country, at a time when the most skillful and astute enemies can deal it disastrous blows.

And yet another month later, April 13 1792, Robespierre defended Pétion against attacks of unnamed enemies:

The mayor of Paris, they say, is ambitious; we are arsonists who slander the constituted authorities to elevate our ambition at the expense of others; well, prove it. Our goal has been to fight in the constituent assembly all the parties of tyranny, Pétion and I have done it, were it even the means Pétion would guarantee, far from foreseeing then that our principles would triumph over a cabal if strong, we believe that after the constituent assembly we would be immolated and that the principles of our ancestors would be adopted: I saw Pétion, at the time when he was brought to the position of Mayor of Paris, two months before his appointment, at a time when we can remember that the votes of the good citizens floated between him and me, I saw the mayor of Paris determined not to accept this place; he read the same feelings in my heart, and when he accepted it, I guarantee to the whole nation that he only did it because he had only considered it as a terrible pitfall for the citizen who would occupy it in such a stormy circumstance for the public good. 

Despite Pétion’s massive new workload, he and Robespierre still found the time to see each other, albeit with work still being the main topic of discussion. In Réponse de Maximilien Robespierre à Jêrome Pétion (November 1792), Robespierre recalled that ”Last January to June, when the ministers were renewed, I saw you (Pétion) in the firm belief that it was you who had chosen them. As I asked you if this action of the court was not suspicious to you, you replied, with a very remarkable air of consent: “Oh! if only you knew what I know! If only you knew who nominated them!” I guessed you, and I said to you, laughing at your good faith: “it’s you, perhaps.” And then, rubbing your hands, you responded: “Hem, hem,” No matter how much you persisted in confirming this fact to me, I didn't want to believe it. I esteemed you too much to suppose that you would have the necessary credit with Louis XVI and his courtiers to give him ministers.” Somewhere after Robespierre was sworn in as public prosecutor, the two also co-authored the pamphlet Observations sur la nécessité de la reunion des hommes de bon foi contre les intrigues par Jérome Pétion, Maire de Paris; et Maximilien Robespierre, Accusateur Public du département de Paris.

But all while this ”bromance” was playing out, so too was the debate on whether or not France ought to go to war. It’s most influential voices were Robespierre on the anti-war side, and Pétion’s childhood friend and freshly baked member of the Legislative Assembly Brissot on the pro-war side. Pétion himself would appear to have stayed neutral in the conflict, I have at least not been able to find any instance of him speaking his mind on the topic. But on April 25 1792, five days after France had declared war on Austria, he adressed the following letter to Robespierre, regretting the session at the Jacobins held the same day, during which Brissot’s ally Guadet had loudly denounced Robespierre, calling him an ”imperial speaker […] who constantly puts his pride before public affairs, the position to which he was called”, after which Robespierre had requested time to properly respond, something which he was granted. Pétion does however not attack Guadet for saying what he had said about Robespierre, instead confining himself to lamenting division in general in a time when external war has just been declared:

The session which took place yesterday [sic] at the Jacobins saddened me. Is it possible that we’re tearing ourselves apart like this with our own hands? I don't know what demon thus blows the fire of discord. What! It is when we are at war with the enemies without that we will stir up trouble within. The Society most useful to the progress of the public spirit and of liberty is on the point of being torn apart. We suspect each other, we insult each other, we slander each other, we accuse each other respectively of being traitors and corrupt. Perhaps if the men who present themselves thus were to see themselves in the open they would esteem each other. How hideous human passions are. What, we can't have the calm and energy of free men? We cannot judge objects in cold blood, we scream like children and are furious. I truly tremble when I consider who we are and always wonder if we will retain our freedom. I haven't rested all night, and have only dreamed of misfortunes. A grace, my friend, be aware of the split that is preparing itself. Caution and firmness. I see there men who seem to have the most fervent patriotism and whom I believe to be the most perverse and corrupt men. I see others who are only stunned and inconsequential but who do as much harm by levity as others by combination. Irritated self-esteem, deceived ambitions play the biggest game. When we reach port, must storms arise and the ship run the risk of crashing against the rock? Think about it seriously. Redouble your efforts to get us out of this mess. Be well.  Your friend.  Pétion. 

On April 27 1792, Robespierre could deliver a speech by the name of Réponse de M. Robespierre, aux discours de MM. Brissot & Guadet du 25 avril 1792 in response to what Guadet had said about him two days earlier. In it, he stated among other things that the things the two reproached him for ”are precisely the same charges brought against me and against Péthion [sic] last July by Dandré, Barnave, Duport, La Fayette!” Something which the authors of the journal Chronique de Paris picked up on when recounting the speech:

…Before finishing, [Robespierre] had taken care to name M. Pétion, and to establish between them a community of ideas, a relation of feelings on the objects which divide the society. He knows very well that M. Pétion is far from approving his follies, or rather his fury, but he also knows that he could not disarm him without losing a large part of his popularity, so the goal was not missed, and Robespierre's party was swelled with all the worthy friends of the worthy Pétion. 

Two days after that, April 29 1792, Pétion writes yet another letter to Robespierre:

My friend, I will go to the Jacobins tonight and ask to speak. I will not speak of people, but of things. I will set forth principles and I will come to conclusions suitable for restoring peace. The situation of this society is getting worse day by day. After having rendered such important services, when it can render still more important ones, it would be terrible if it gave the scandalous example of a split. The spirits are very irritated. One becomes the fable of all malicious people, the newspapers are tearing this Society apart, tearing its members apart, we must put an end to all writings. Your friend, Pétion. 

Pétion did indeed show up to the Jacobins the very same day, where he, according to the minutes, ”made a long motion of order tending to maintain the union in the Society, and asked that all these quarrels be moved on from.” Right after the club had ordered the speech printed, Robespierre tried to take the floor but was refused by ”girondin” president Lasource. The next day, he once again attempted to speak against Brissot and Guadet, underlining that ”I want to keep to the limits fixed by M. Pétion,” but that his approach had been turned against them by ”libelists, directed against him, against me, against this society and against the people itself.” Robespierre again insists on a closeness between him and Pétion: 

I know he is horrified of plots hatched against me: his heart has spilled over into mine; he cannot see without shuddering these horrible calumnies which assail me from all sides.

But his thoughts did not gain any approval from the jacobins this day either, and Robespierre instead opted to found a journal — Le Defenseur de la Constution — to attack his enemies from instead. When mayor Pétion and Procureur de la Commune Manuel got temporarily suspended from their duties on July 6 and arrested on July 7, for complicity in the demonstration of June 20, Robespierre used number 9 (July 14 1792) of said journal to defend them (in Réponse de Maximilien Robespierre à Jérôme Pétionhe confidently reminded him that ”no one more than me defended you in a more public and more loyal manner, against all the harassment [the court] brought upon you.”) On July 13, when the suspension of Pétion was lifted, ”M. Robespierre, while applauding [the decree], points out, however, that this should be less a cause for rejoicing as there are reasons for the true friends of liberty to grieve the fact that this decree was postponed for a fortnight.”

In Réponse de Maximilien Robespierre à Jérôme Pétion (November 30 1792), Robespierre reported about the following meeting (that Pétion also confirmed when later responding to him) the two had had, roughly a month after Pétion had been returned to duty, on the topic of popular insurrection:

On August 7, I saw the mayor of Paris enter my house; it was the first time that I received this honor, although I had been closely connected with you. I conclude that a great motive brings you; you talk to me for a whole hour about the dangers of insurrection. I had no particular influence on the events; but as I quite often frequented the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, where the members of the directory of the federates habitually went, you urged me earnestly to preach your doctrine in that society. You told me that it was necessary to defer resistance to oppression until the National Assembly had pronounced the deposition of the King; but that it was necessary at the same time to leave him the leisure to discuss this great question with all possible slowness. You could not, however, be sure that the court would adjourn the project of slitting our throats for as long as it pleased the National Assembly to adjourn the forfeiture; and everyone knew that the royalist party was then dominant in the Legislative Assembly; and your Brissot and his friends had delivered long speeches on this question, the sole object of which was to prove that it was necessary to retreat from it, and ceaselessly to postpone the decision. You even know what public disfavor their equivocal conduct had incurred; they saw in it only the project of frightening the court by the fear of an insurrection, in order to force it to take back ministers of their choice. I could have made these comparisons myself; but such was still my confidence in you, and, if it must be said, the feelings of friendship which your unexpected step aroused in my heart, that I believed you up to a certain point; but the people and the federals did not. 

Two days later, the insurrection of August 10 took place. Pétion’s behavior during this night would become a big subject of quarrel between him and Robespierre in the months to come. Two days after the insurrection, August 12, Robespierre begun to serve at the so-called Insurrectional Commune. The power struggle between this body and the Legislative Assembly would it too serve as cause for conflict between the two. Already on Robespierre’s second day at the commune, August 13, Pétion and Manuel came there, having just escorted the royal family to their new prison in the Temple. Giving an account over this mission, the two stated that the place ”did not seem suitably arranged,” and that the king should be kept somewhere else instead. Later during the session, Robespierre claims (I can’t find this recorded in the session’s actual minutes) that Pétion presented a report from the Legislative Assembly to within 24 hours dissolve the commune and replace it by the old municipality, a proposal which got rejected. He would later reproach Pétion for both of these things.

According to J.M Thompson’s Robespierre (1935), on August 17 Robespierre was commissioned by the commune to interview Pétion to get him to co-operate (I can’t find this in the commune’s minutes either). The interview did however not go that well, resulting in the following letter from Pétion to Robespierre, written on August 20:

You know, my friend, what my feelings are for you, you know that I am not your rival, you know that I have always given you proofs of devotion and friendship. It would be useless to try to divide us, you would have to stop loving liberty in order for me to stop loving you. I have always found more fault with you to your face than behind your back. When I think you too ready to take offence, or when I believe, rightly or wrongly, that you are mistaken about a line of action, I tell you so. You also reproach me for being too trustful. You may be right; but you must not assume too readily that many of my acquaintances are your enemies. People can disagree on a number of unessential points without becoming enemies; and your heart is said to be in the right place. Besides, it is childish to take offence over the things people say against one. Imagine, my friend, the number of people who utter all lands of libels against the mayor of Paris! Imagine how many of them I know to have spread damaging reports about me! Yet it doesn’t worry me, I can assure you. If I am not totally indifferent to what others think about me, at least I value my own opinion more highly. No… you and I are never likely to take opposite sides: we shall always hold the same political faith. I need not assure you that it is impossible for me to join in any movement against you: my tastes, my character and my principles all forbid it. I don’t believe that you covet my position any more than I covet that of the king. But if, when my term of office comes to an end, the people were to offer you the mayoralty, I suppose that you would accept it; whereas in all good conscience I could never accept the crown. Look after yourself, let us march forward, we are in a situation threatening enough to force us to think only of the public good. 

As can be seen, Pétion was still trying to salvage the relationship that had begun to deteriorate already in the spring, an effort that Robespierre seemed to share. If we’re to believe Buzot’s memoirs, written in 1793, Robespierre had suggested making ”a solemn declaration on the events which preceded the revolution of the 10th of August” to Pétion, who in his turn ”was willing to lend himself to it, for he had a kind of inexcusable weakness for Robespierre.” But when Robespierre came forward with the finished declaration that, according to Buzot, contained ”a lot of baseness and sweet talk [sic] for Louis XVI,”Pétion did however refuse to sign it, and Robespierre was forced to rework it. In an address from the representatives of the Paris commune to their fellow citizens dated September 1, Robespierre and his colleages also underlined that ”the principal artifice which our enemies employed to destroy us, was to oppose to the assembly of the representatives of the commune the names of Manuel and Pétion, and to claim that our existence is an attack against the authority in which these two magistrates were clothed.” But the relationship was well under way to break down, and the first days of September 1792 would be filled with conflicts between the two, in relation to the so called ”September massacres.” This time it would instead be Pétion who got appalled over Robespierre’s conduct.

Again on September 1, one day before the massacres, Robespierre held a speech to the same Paris Commune opposing the idea of opening the city’s barriers, that, in Pétion’s own words, ”saddened my soul.” […] [Robespierre] gave himself up to extremely animated declamations, to the lapses of a gloomy imagination; he perceived precipices under his feet, liberticidal plots; he pointed out pretended conspirators; he addressed himself to the people, excited the spirits, and occasioned, among those who heard him, the liveliest fermentation. I replied to this speech, to restore calm, to dissipate these black illusions, and to bring the discussion back to the only point which should occupy the assembly.”In Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution française (1797), Louis Marie Prudhomme writes that, two days later, September 3 1792, Théophile Mandar went over to Danton’s place, where he saw ”all ministers, with the exception of Roland, Lacroix, president [of the Assembly], Pétion, mayor of Paris, Robespierre, Camille-Desmoulins, Fabre d’Églantine, Manuel and several members of the so-called Commune of August 10. The presidents and commanders from each of the 48 sections had come as well.” Half past seven in the evening everyone sat down in Danton’s salon to discuss the means to save Paris. Two hours later, Mandar, Pétion and Robespierre all retired to a different room, where Mandar laid out the idea of setting up a temporary dictatorship to stop the prison massacres for the two. Robespierre did however not respond positively, instead crying out: ”Be aware! Brissot would become dictator!” ”O Robespierre,” Mandar said to him, ”it is not the dictatorship that you fear, it is not the homeland that you love: it is Brissot that you hate.”  ”I hate dictatorship and I hate Brissot!”  Pétion meanwhile didn’t say a word.

The day after that, September 4, Pétion and Robespierre found themselves discussing Brissot (who Robespierre on September 2 had denounced as an accomplice of Brunswick at the Paris commune, leading to his house getting searched on the 3rd) once more, this time at the Hôtel de Ville, as revealed through the following part from Pétion’s Discours de Jérôme Pétion sur l’accusation intentée contre Maximilien Robespierre (November 5 1792):

The surveillance Committee launched an arrest warrant against Minister Roland; it was the 4th (September), and the massacres were still going on. Danton was informed of it, he came to the town hall, he was with Robespierre. [���] I had an explanation with Robespierre, it was very lively. I still made him face the reproaches that friendship tempered in his absence, I told him: ”Robespierre, you are doing a lot of harm; your denunciations, your alarms, your hatreds, your suspicions, they agitate the people; explain yourself; do you have any facts? do you have proof? I fight with you; I only love the truth; I only want liberty.” ”You allow yourself to be surrounded,” [he replied], ”you allow yourself to be warned. You are disposed against me, you see my enemies every day; you see Brissot and his party.”  ”You are mistaken, Robespierre; no one is more on guard than I against prejudices, and judges with more coolness, men and things. You’re right, I see Brissot, however rarely, but you don’t know him, and I know him since his childhood. I have seen him in those moments when the whole soul shows itself; where one abandons oneself without reservation to friendship, to trust: I know his disinterestedness; I know these principles, I assure you that they are pure; those who make him a party leader do not have the slightest idea of ​​his character; he has lights and knowledge; but he has neither the reserve, nor the dissimulation, nor these catchy forms, nor this spirit of consistency which constitutes a party leader, and what will surprise you is that, far from leading others, he is very easy to abuse.” Robespierre insisted, but confined himself to generalities.   ”Allow us to explain ourselves, I told him, tell me frankly what’s on your mind, what it is you know.”  ”Well!” he replied, ”I believe that Brissot is with Brunswick.”   ”What mistake is yours!” I exclaimed. ”It is truly madness; this is how your imagination leads you astray: wouldn't Brunswick be the first to cut his head off? Brissot is not mad enough to doubt it: which of us can seriously capitulate! which of us does not risk his life! Let us banish unjust mistrust.”  Danton became entangled in the colloquy, saying that this was not the time for arguments; that it was necessary to have all these explanations after the expulsion of the enemies; that this decisive object alone should occupy all good citizens.

In her memoirs (1834), Charlotte Robespierre talks of yet another meeting between her brother and Pétion regarding the massacres, but in her version it is instead the former who accuses the latter of doing a lot of harm. Some  historians have suggested this meeting is the same Pétion is describing above, though if that’s the case I wonder why he doesn’t mention Charlotte anywhere in his account (as well as why Robespierre would even bring his sister with him when going to discuss political matters in a city where a massacre is currently taking place…):

A few days after the events of 2 and 3 September, Pétion came to see my brother. Maximilien had disapproved of the prison massacres, and would have wanted each prisoner to be sent before judges elected by the people. Pétion and Robespierre conversed on these latest events. I was present at their interview, and I heard my brother reproach Pétion for not having interposed his authority to stop the deplorable excesses of the 2nd and 3rd. Pétion seemed piqued by this reproach, and replied dryly enough: All I can tell you is that no human power could have stopped them. He rose some moments later, left, and did not return. Any kind of relations ceased, from this day, between him and my brother. They did not see each other again until the Convention, where Pétion sat with the Girondins and my brother with the Mountain.

In the 1960 article Charlotte Robespierre et ”ses mémoires,” Gabriel Pioro and Pierre Labracherie wanted to dismiss Charlotte’s story, finding it unlikely for her to have been in Paris by early September 1792, almost a whole month before her younger brother was elected to the National Convention and the two went to the capital for that reason. Though I suppose it’s not impossible for Charlotte to have gone to visit Maximilien beforehand, or that she’s simply very generous with what she describes as ”a few days.”

If Charlotte’s friend Armand Joseph Guffroy, who him to moved from Arras to Paris after getting elected to the National Convention, is to be believed, her claim that Pétion and Robespierre stopped seeing each other following the events of September gets muddied as well. In his Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices… (1795) Guffroy writes: ”At Pétion’s house, the only time Robespierre took me there; I saw the latter eating a pot of fine jams, which were very expensive at the time.”

Regardless of any jam dinners, it’s clear the relationship was breaking down for real. On October 29 1792, Jean-Baptiste Louvet read his Accusation contre Maximilien Robespierre to the Convention, accusing him of turning himself into ”the idol of the people,” slandering ”the best patriots,” instigating the September massacres and tyrannizing the parisian electoral assembly, all with the goal of setting himself up as a dictator. A week later, November 7, Chabot told the jacobins that Pétion’s wife Suzanne had ”applauded everything Louvet said against Robespierre.”

Both Robespierre and Pétion picked up their pens to write a response speech to Louvet. Robespierre pronounced his to the Convention on November 5, which then passed onto the order of the day, preventing Pétion from holding his. The very same day, Collot d’Herbois exclaimed to the jacobins: ”I agree with Manuel on the comparison that he made in saying that Pétion and Robespierre were the twins of liberty; he meant that they were stars like Castor and Pollux; that they would appear in turn, but I ask that Robespierre be the summer star, and Pétion the winter star.” Pétion did however still wish to get his speech out, so shortly thereafter he published Discours de Jérôme Pétion, sur l’accusation intentée contre Maximilien Robespierre as a pamphlet instead. This is what would truly mark the beginning of the end for the relationship.

Pétion begins by writing that “I had promised myself to keep the most absolute silence on the events that have happened since August 10,” but that, after having heard so many things said about him and being asked for his opinion on the matters so many times, “I will say frankly what I know about some men, what I think about things.”  After explaining to which groups he thinks the insurrection of August 10 was due and to which ones it wasn’t, and deploring of the September massacres, saying that ”I cannot bring myself to confuse glory with infamy, and to defile August 10 with the excesses of September 2” (thereby seperating himself from Robespierre, who his response to Louvet instead argued that the massacres had been the inevitable sequel to the insurrection, and that to condemn one would therefore be to condemn the other), Pétion turns to Robespierre. Having regretted the speech held by him on September 1, through which he, if unintentionally, ”led the commune into inconsiderate moves, into extreme parties,” and reported about their interview on September 4, Pétion brings up Louvet’s accusation that his friend had been aiming at dictatorship. Just like with Brissot, Pétion dismisses these accusations, but this through pointing out the flaws in the designated one’s personality:

Robespierre's character explains what he did: Robespierre is extremely touchy and defiant; everywhere he sees conspiracies, betrayals, precipices. His bilious temperament, his atrabilious imagination present all objects to him in dark colours; imperious in his opinion, listening only to himself, not supporting contrariety, never forgiving those who have hurt his self-esteem, and never recognizing his faults; denouncing lightly, and being irritated by the slightest suspicion; always believing that someone is occupying himself with him in order to persecute him; boasting of his services and speaking of himself with little reserve; not knowing the proprieties, and thereby harming the causes he defends; desiring above all the favors of the people, paying court to them unceasingly, and ringing out their applause with affectation; it is this, it is above all this last weakness, which, piercing through the acts of his public life, has been able to make people believe that Robespierre breathed high destinies, and that he wished to usurp the dictatorial power. As for me, I cannot persuade myself that this chimera seriously occupied his thoughts, that it was the object of his desires, and the goal of his anticipation. 

At the very end of the pamphlet, Pétion publishes an open letter to the jacobins, a place where he, ”since some time have been attacked more or less openly.” Pétion reminds the society of the great services he has rendered it and even that he had saved it during the big Feuillant split one year earlier. He also recalled that Robespierre, unlike him, had been very afraid following this split — ”I saw Robespierre trembling, Robespierre wanting to flee, Robespierre not daring to go up to the assembly… ask him if I trembled. I saved Robespierre himself from persecution, by attaching myself to his fate, when everyone despised him.”

Robespierre answered Pétion in Réponse de Maximilien Robespierre à Jérome Pétion, a text that made up all of number 7 of his Lettres de Maximilien Robespierre à ses commettans (November 30 1792). Robespierre started by regretting having to write what he did in the first place:

What is, my dear Pétion, the instability of human affairs, since you, once my brother in arms and at the same time the most peaceful of all men, suddenly declare yourself the most ardent of my accusers? Don't think that I want to occupy myself here either with you or with me. We are both two atoms lost in the immensity of the moral and political world. It is not your accusations that I want to answer; I am accused of having already shown too much condescension in this way; it is up to your current political doctrine. It would already be a little late, perhaps, to refute your speech: but there is always time to defend truth and principles. Our quarrels are of a day: the principles are of all times. It is only on this condition, my dear Pétion, that I can consent to pick up the gauntlet you threw at me. You will even recognize, in my way of fighting, either the friendship, or the old weakness that I showed for you. If, in this completely philanthropic kind of fencing, you were exposed to some slight injury, it only affects your self-esteem; and you reassured me in advance on that point, by protesting yourself that it was null. Moreover, the right of censorship is reciprocal; it is the safeguard of freedom; and you love principles so much that you will find more pleasure, I am sure, in being the object of them yourself, than you felt in exercising them against me.

Robespierre then goes on to accuse Pétion of in his pamphlet not having treated the Insurrection of August 10th with the respect it deserves, depriving the people and sections of Paris — ”the destroyers of tyranny” — who carried it out of the merit of their service, and to even have done everything in his power to stop the insurrection by continuously telling the sections to remain calm. Then he hadn’t showed up to the Paris Commune until three days after the siege of of the Tuileries, and then to report that the assembly wanted to close the commune and call the old municipality back (”You constantly sighed for the return of your semi-aristocratic municipality. […] The spirit that animated the defenders of liberty frightened you!”) and to ”prove that it was not necessary to lock Louis XVI in the Temple, and that if he did not stay in a magnificent hotel the whole of France would rise up against the commune.”Pétion had even on his own initiative gone to the king two weeks before the insurrection — ”no one knows if it was to convert him or to justify yourself.” Robespierre asks why Pétion seemingly shows more indulgence for the court than for the people behind the insurrection, noting that ”I always believed I saw in you less condescension for the warmth of patriotism than for the excesses of the aristocracy.”

Besides this main charge, Robespierre also reproaches Pétion of not having done enough to stop the demonstration of June 20, which, unlike the insurrection, was driven by ”the intriguers who surrounded you [who] wanted […] to regain possession of the ministry,” of being jealous of him for getting elected first deputy of Paris, which he claims is what caused him to stand for election in Eure-et-Loir instead (”you were unable to hide your sorrow at the very moment; and rather than suffer the affront of priority given to another citizen, you preferred to be chosen third in Chartres, than second in Paris”), making a big deal of having reached the conclusions presented in the pamphlet by shutting himself alone (”Is an author obliged to prove that he himself went into secrecy to compose his works? And aren’t such singular oratorical precautions suspect?”) and interpretating La Fayette favorably even after the massacre on Champ-de-Mars, having guaranteed Robespierre ”a hundred times” of his innocence since he was at the head of the armies. Robespierre claims that it was this friendly attitude that caused Pétion to be elected to escort the king back from Varennes. He fights back against Pétion’s description of his personality — ”I am as easygoing, as good-natured in private life, as you find me touchy in public affairs; although you have long experienced it, and my friendship for you has long survived the processes which most offended my principles” — giving an equally unflattering one in return: ”I guarantee that, far from being sullen, defiant, melancholic, you are the man whose blood circulates most gently, whose heart is least agitated by the spectacle of human perfidies, whose philosophy most patiently supports the misery of others.” He also takes offence over Pétion’s claim that he was afraid during the splitting of the jacobin club and that Pétion saved him from persecution. Robespierre claims that he was persecuted no more than Pétion during this period, and besides, ”why are you more attached to me than to the homeland, or at least to your own honor? And how did you imagine that you were for me a more powerful protector than the public interest, and the sanctity of the cause that I defended?”

Robespierre does however seek to exempt Pétion somewhat. He concludes his pamphlet and recent conduct is the result of him having let praise go to his head as mayor (forgetting that the true heros of history were martyrs) due to being misled by intriguers (the girondins). On August 11 or 12, Guadet and Brissot would even have come over to his place, the latter openly reprimanding him for ”the ease with which you had complied with the popular wish,” accusing him of cowardice and summoning him to stop ”the chariot of the revolution.” This, according to Robespierre, is what caused Pétion to show up to the commune the following day to announce the assembly’s plan to dismantle it and bring the old municipality back.

Pétion wrote back in Observations de Jérôme Pétion sur la lettre de Maximilien Robespierre, released somewhere in December 1792, the majority of which was spent debunking all of Robespierre’s reproaches. No, he did everything he could to stop the demonstration of June 20, and ”I defy anyone to say I brought it about or rejoiced over it.” No, he has only ever spoken about the Insurrection of August 10 ”with admiration and enthusiam,” he will however never conflate it with ”the horrible day of September 2.” No, he did not try to stop the insurrection, he only put an end to a badly organized movement on July 26 that wouldn’t have led to any good, and during the night when it happened he only wrote a circular to the sections (he was kept from going out), recommending them to maintain order and tranquility in general, a circular which the sections appreciated. No, he has indeed rendered justice to the people of Paris for their role in the insurrection, he even wrote outright: it is due to the people. No, he has given the sections the credit they deserve as well, he just said the insurrection would have taken place even without the support from the commissioners sent by some of them. The sections have in fact showered him with proofs of their confidence, and he has kept up a ”fraternal correspondence” with them. No, he didn’t appear at the commune until three days after ”the day of the Tuileries,” he was there already the day after it, speaking of their victory, and when he came there on the thirteenth it was not to put forward a report dismantling the commune. No, it is a lie that Guadet and Brissot came over on August 11 or 12 and scolded him for not having put a stop to the insurrection, they did on the other hand come over the night before and exclaim: the homeland is saved! No, he absolutely did not visit the king in order to convert him or justify himself two weeks before the insurrection (”I couldn’t believe my eyes! […] You know me, and these words come out of your mouth. You read my compte rendu to my fellow citizens, and these words come out of your mouth!”). The king had in fact requested him in several secrets meetings that he refused, he only ever went to see him on official invitations and for business. No, he is not attacking the Jacobins in his letter, he’s protecting them against fights and intrigues which could dishonor them.

Pétion is certain Robespierre knew full well non of these charges were founded, claiming he made them in order to ”indispose the public against me, and make it favorable to you by declaring yourself its avenger. If this is clever, it is neither fair nor just.” He then directs some denounciations against him in turn, starting by regretting the humorous tone used by Robespierre in his response — ”you say of me what you do not think; you say it with bitterness, with passion; you allow yourself sarcasm, irony, mind games beyond all propriety” — and especially that he refers to him by his firstname like that’s supposed to be funny. Where Robespierre accused him of being blinded by ”intriguers,” Pétion reproaches Robespierre of being the ”courtier” of the people, placing himself at the head of whatever opinion that for the moment happens to be popular, in order to remain so himself. That is why he has never gone to a public riot to try to stop ”the excesses of the malicious”, out of fear of making them his enemies, and why he today carasses the sections, even though both he and his friends spoke ill or them during the electoral assembly. It is also the reason Pétion always defended him against the charge that he had had the ambition to become mayor — ”not only would he find himself overwhelmed by often minute details, and above all without glory, but, as one must sometimes know how to resist the aberrations of public opinion, how one must know how to momentarily incur the disgrace of the people, he would never have the strength to tell them that he is in the wrong: he would believe his reputation or popularity lost.” While denying that him standing for election in Eure-et-Loir had anything to do with him being jealous of Robespierre (if the people of Paris didn’t give him the most votes, it was because they found him more useful as mayor), Pétion also critiques the electoral assembly of Paris, which he claims ”was influenced, was dominated by a small number of men,” lifting the fact Robespierre’s brother got elected as a deputy of Paris as an example. Pétion also comes back to his critique of Robespierre’s actions during the September massacres again, seemingly endorsing the idea that he on September 2 had tried to use them to rid himself of his political opponents:

I said that on this occasion you gave yourself over to the excesses of a disordered and dark imagination; that you allowed yourself odious denunciations; that you had gone so far as to denounce as traitors, men that were friends of liberty, whose talents were in your eyes the real crimes, against which you had not the slightest proof, and that this was then to indicate the victims. I now add that in the fury of your declamations, you announced that it was necessary to purge the soil of liberty of the conspirators who infected it; but with a tone, a gesture which was so well understood, that the spectators responded with trembling, and shouted: Yes... Yes, let’s do it.

Nevertheless, he reveals to Robespierre that when one of the many citizens outraged by this wanted to denounce and testify against him, Pétion had stopped him from doing so. Like how Robespierre underlined how he for a long time had defended Pétion and believed his intentions to be good, Pétion too reminds him that ”when I was told that you were my enemy, that you were eaten up with jealousy against me, that you would never forgive me the favor I enjoyed, I defended you with all my soul, I took your side against all odds.” Today, he must however announce that ”I am forced to believe in the baseness and wickedness of your heart,” and he reveals that ”what caused the blindfold to fall off my eyes” was a speech Robespierre held at the Jacobins on October 28, where he says that, the day after the massacre on Champ de Mars, ”I saw Pétion, who then also fought against the intriguers.” Pétion reacts strongly on this choice of wording:

You only uttered one word, and it was more treacherous than a whole speech. You seemed to throw it away accidentally: you said, going back to the time of the Constituent Assembly, that then I was fighting intriguers, and that I embraced the good party, as if I had never ceased to pursue both traitors and enemies of liberty. Don't worry, I won't let them rest. I was well aware of the system of calumny and persecution directed against me; but I thought, I confess, that it would be without result, and I deigned to do so. I believed above all that you were not immersed in this intrigue.

Pétion ends with yet another unflattering description:

I do not think, and I do you this justice, that you are a man to ever allow yourself to be influenced by the lure of riches; but let Pon know how to skilfully caress your vanity; let the most salutary project be presented to you like an intrigue woven by your enemies, like a conspiracy, like a betrayal, your imagination immediately catches fire, you lose yourself in an abyss of conjectures, and you give in to the first panel held out to you. I will show you twenty of your opinions which are absolutely in the same direction as that of the court and of the counter-revolutionaries. If these opinions had been held by anyone other than you, his reputation would be lost, and he would be regarded as a traitor to his country. I saw men of good faith, without any interest who were not your enemies, who said to me: is it possible that Robespierre is sold, I always told them not to worry, but that you had a bad head, and that you lead to the delirium of your imagination. I have always added at the same time that you would sacrifice everything for a quarter of an hour of popular favour. 

Robespierre responded in Deuxième lettre de Maximilien Robespierre en réponse au second discours de Jérôme Petion, that made up all of number 10 of Lettres à ses comettras… He started by telling Pétion that his complaints that he used irony, ridicule and tried to caluminate him seem unjust to him, and that he won’t change his tone for this second reply. Besides, he added, the friends of the homeland find such few occasions to laugh these days. As for calling Pétion by his firstname, he reminds him that he never did so without adding his lastname as well, and what’s so bad about the name Jérôme anyways?

Turning to countering Pétion’s arguments, Robespierre writes that, even if Pétion does view the insurrection of August 10 as something positive, his conduct during it was still way too moderate. Pétion admits to in the conversation they had on August 7 have wanted to postpone the insurrection until the moment when the legislative assembly would have pronounced on the king's forfeiture, ”that is to say, until the end of the centuries.” He confesses to in the days before August 10 have tried to keep the calm ”and all the reasons that you give to explain your conduct on one of these occasions may well prove that you were a brave man, but not that you were a determined revolutionary, nor a clever politician.” He might not have visited the king on his own initiative, but that’s nevertheless how it came across for all patriots (besides, I didn’t write you had the shame (honte) to visit the king, I wrote goodness (bonté)! Robespierre even argues that the reason Pétion stayed at home during the insurrection was because ”you felt so inclined to oppose the insurrection of the people against the tyranny armed to slaughter them, that you knew of no other way of resisting this temptation than to be kept at home.” Pétion’s debunking of the anecdote Brissot and Guadet scolding him for not having stopped the insurrection, Robespierre counters with the fact it was an ”irreproachable citizen” that gave him the story, one whose word he chooses to believe over that of Pétion’s.

As for Pétion’s debunking of the claim he was indifferent to stop the demonstration of June 20, Robespierre simply doesn’t believe it — ”nothing is easier or better proven.” He ridicules Pétion’s suggestion that he was trying to make him look bad in the eyes of the jacobins, ”as if it was me who had composed the diatribe printed at the end of your speech against me,” and when Pétion himself has barely showed up at the club in the last year — ”Jérôme Pétion is therefore a very high power, since he thus places his sole authority in opposition to the services of an immortal society of friends of freedom; since he dares to present it as a stupid herd led by intriguers, at the head of whom he places me.”Pétion’s anger over the fact Robespierre in a speech held two months earlier is recorded to have said Pétion served the revolution well during the National Assembly (implying he doesn’t anymore), he dismisses since, in the version of the speech given in number 3 of Lettres à ses comettras, no such words can be found. Robespierre likewise dismisses Pétion’s claim that he wasn’t jealous at him for getting more votes to the Convention, reminding him that ”the pain did not even allow you to fulfill the commitment you had made with a very well-known man in the republic, to meet that day, at his home, to dine, with me, for an object which essentially concerned public harmony,” as well as Pétion’s suggestion that the electoral assembly was influenced by nepotism since he could only cite his brother as an example, who, he assures, was elected only due to his own merits. The idea that Robespierre would have  spoken ill of the sections or denounced men at the commune just to have them ”exposed to the knife” during the September massacres he too dismisses as simply slander. It is this last charge that breaks the camel’s back for Robespierre: 

Pétion, this excess of atrocity exempts me from all the consideration that I persisted in maintaining with you; and from now on you will only owe my moderation to my contempt. I abandon you to that of all the citizens who have seen me, heard me like this, and who deny you. I abandon you to that of all judicious men, who, in your expressions, as vague as they are artificial, perceive at the same time the hatred, the lie, the implausibility, the contradiction, the insult made at the same time to the public, to the patriotic magistrates, as much as to myself. Pétion, yes, you are now worthy of your masters; you are worthy of cooperating with them in this vast plan of slander and persecution, directed against patriotism and against equality. But no; I am wrong to get angry with you, whatever your intentions; because you take care to ward off all the blows you want to deal yourselves; and following a stroke of wickedness, I see a hundred ridiculous things happen, which you indulge in on purpose for my small pleasures.

In the last couple of pages, Robespierre jokingly accuses Pétion during his time as mayor had gotten into his head the idea that France wanted to crown him king and he, like Caesar, would have to fight this off. ”Good god! We would then have gotten us a king by the name of Jérôme the first! […] If you felt some regrets, who knows if we might not enjoy this one day. You have good friends, who lack neither power nor resources. It is not without reason that they do not want to let us make laws or a constitution, that there has not even been a question of the declaration of rights yet; that they work, with marvelous skill, to kindle civil war, and to plunge us into anarchy; who knows if France will not be obliged to come back to your knees and ask you to dictate laws to it?” He then addresses Pétion as you would a king throughout the rest of the letter, calling him ”sire” and ”your majesty.”

This was truly the final nail in the coffin for the relationship. In number 1 of the second series of his Lettres à ses commettans (January 1 1793), Robespierre regretted the earlier constant tying together of him and Pétion, now viewing it as an attempt of his enemies to undermine him:

In the past, I still remember, Brissot and a few others had entered into I don't know what conspiracy to make my name almost synonymous with that of Jérôme Pétion; they took so much trouble to put them together. I don't know if it was for love of me or of Pétion: but they seemed to have plotted to send me to immortality, in company with the great Jérôme. I have been ungrateful; and, to punish me, they said: since you don't want to be Pétion, you will be Marat. Well, I declare to you, monsieurs, that I want to be neither. 

The trial of Louis XVI, which had been ongoing at the same time as Pétion and Robespierre’s breakup exchange, provided yet another moment for the two to oppose each other, with Pétion suggesting the Convention first discuss whether or not the king should be judged, a question deemed quite unneccessary for Robespierre, who instead wanted to see the king executed right away, without any trial. In a speech to the Convention held December 3 he lamented the direction Pétion had led them in:

Today Louis shares the mandataries of the people; we speak for and we speak against him. Who would have suspected two months ago that it would be a question here, whether he was inviolable? But since a member of the National Convention (citizen Pétion) presented the question, whether the King could be judged, as the object of serious deliberation, preliminary to any other question, the inviolability of which the conspirators of the Constituent Assembly covered up his first perjuries, was invoked, to protect his latest attacks. O crime! O shame! 

When Robespierre a few weeks later, on December 28, defended himself against the charge of having belonged to ”the cabal of Lafayette” (just your typical convention workday) he nevertheless exclaimed: ”I attest to my former colleagues, Pétion, Rabaud, and many others, if I had any connections with this faction!” When the time had arrived to finally decide the former king’s fate, Pétion voted for an appeal to the people, and for death with the so called Mailhe amendment, calling for a postponement of the execution, while Robespierre voted against an appeal to the people and for immediate execution.

On January 27, six days after the execution of the king, Pétion was struck from the Jacobin club’s list of members, on the suggestion of Monestier. Two months later, March 26, Pétion and Robespierre were both elected for the so called Commission of Public Safety, alongside 23 others. The commission, which consisted of both fervent montagnards and fervent girondins, was however off to a rocky start, and already on April 6 it was put to death and replaced by the Committee of Public Safety.

Four days after that, April 10, Robespierre spoke for long at the Convention, denouncing the girondins as ”a powerful faction conspiring with the tyrants of Europe to give us a king, with a sort of aristocratic constitution” led by Brissot. The girondins were the successors of Lafayette, accomplices of Dumouriez, Miranda and d’Orléans, and supported by William Pitt, who had dishonored the Insurrection of August 10 and wanted to flee Paris with the king, tried to cause civil war by calling for an appeal to the people during the trial of said king, as well as having ”depressed the energetic patriots, protected the hypocritical moderates, successively corrupted the defenders of the people, attached to their Cause those who had some talent, and persecuted those whom they could not seduce.” Robespierre ended with asking that the Revolutionary Tribunal be charged with setting up a trial for ”Dumouriez and his accomplices” as well as for the Orléans family, Sillery and Madame de Genlis. Pétion’s name got mentioned outright four times in the speech, Robespierre accusing him of being the friend and defender of the general Francisco de Miranda, arrested since February 1793 after a failed siege of the city Maastricht and later denounced as an accomplice of Dumouriez.

Two days later, April 12, a stormy exchange played out between the two former friends at the Convention, after Pétion had asked that François-Martin Poultier be censored for making a personal suggestion when meant to speak in the name of his committee of war. Several variants of this exchange can be found throughout the different journals. Here is the one given in the Moniteur:

Robespierre: I demand the censure of those who protect the traitors. (Pétion rushes to the tribune, some murmurs rise)  Robespierre: And their accomplices.  Pétion: Yes, their accomplices, and you yourself. It is finally time for all these infamies to end, it is time at last for all this infamy to end; it is time for traitors and slanderers to lay their heads on the scaffold; and I pledge here to pursue them to death.  Robespierre: Answer the facts.  Pétion: It’s you I will be pursuing. Yes, Robespierre will have to be branded at last, as the slanderers used to be. 

The Mercure universel:

Pétion: I ask that the rapporteur be censored; instead of the committee's opinion, he allows himself to report his own to mislead the public. We must punish the conspirators. Robespierre: That’s you. (applauds from the tribunes, cries of indignation in the assembly) Pétion (runs to the tribune; unrest): It is finally time for all these infamies to end, it is time for the convention to be respected: I will pursue the slanderers, the traitors! Robespierre: Where are they? Pétion: You!

Journal de Paris:

Pétion asks that this member be censored, for having expressed an opinion that the Committee of War had not directed to him. Here Robespierre interrupts Pétion, and the interpellation he made, which we did not hear, was undoubtedly very lively, because Pétion flew to the tribune, and in a voice more vehement than he ever used in the two Assemblies of which he was a member, he complained of this system of slander adroitly directed against the true friends of liberty, by these people who thus believe they are hiding, at the moment that they will be discovered, the plots that they themselves have formed. He thunders against these informers who, without proof, pile denunciations on top of each other, without ever proving any of them. Pétion concluded that all denunciations should be signed, under penalty of being subjected to the same contempt as their authors.

Le Logotachigraphe:

Pétion: I demand censure against the rapporteur who allowed himself to overstep the powers he had received from the committee. Marat: I ask that we pursue the traitors. (noise) Pétion (flies to the tribune): I will indeed ask that the traitors and conspirators be punished (interrupted by boos from the stands. Part of the assembly stands up and shows its indignation: the president is summoned to remind the stands of respect.) The president: I have called the tribunes to order several times, and I call them again at this moment, to the execution of the law which prohibits any sign of disapproval and approval, and I conjure them, in the name of public safety, to remember that all is lost if the National Convention does not retain its liberty. Pétion: It is impossible (murmurs) to tolerate this infamy any longer. It is impossible for an honest man to restrain his indignation when he sees that men who should keep the most profound silence; that men who are marked with the most infamy dare to insult him with this audacity. Yes, I intend to pursue the traitors; I intend to pursue the slanderers, and I tell all of France that Robespierre must either be punished or branded with hot iron on the forehead as a slanderer.

Le Thermomètre du Jour:

Pétion calls for censure against Poultier for having expressed an opinion tending to mislead the public. It is necessary to underline, said Robespierre, that one is trying to save the traitors. Immediately Pétion, going up to the podium, said: ”It is impossible for an honest man to tolerate any longer the system of slander and disorganization that I see followed with a constancy that only great interest can give. Yes, I will fight against traitors and slanderers. In the end, either I must be punished or Robespierre must be branded with the hot iron with which ancient peoples branded slanderers. Even before the existence of the convention, people had already formed the wish to slander it, to outrage it, to degrade it, and some people have continued to follow this system. I ask what more our enemies would have done? Aren't these the real enemies of the republic? I will never compromise with despots, and if the enemy were at the gates of Paris, we would see which are the brave false ones, and which ones are the courageous republicans!

Pétion then went on a long rant about the need to punish the traitors, before denouncing Marat. Robespierre responded that ”I will be permitted to respond to your calumnies,” to which Pétion, according to Le Logotachigraphe, replied the following way:

I would like a written struggle to begin here, because words are elusive; I would like the indictments to be recorded in writing and the answers that each person submitted to put their head to be heard in writing, and I would then ask that whoever is found guilty loses it. I do not claim to be constantly engaged in a struggle, neither with lungs nor with screams, nor with insults and insults; all this means nothing: this is not how free men justify themselves: free men act with perfect integrity. I am not asking here for imprecation or approval; but I ask for peace and quiet; I ask above all that we do not allow ourselves these indecent accusations, a thousand times more atrocious than facts. We have already fought in writing with Robespierre; he knows that I know him, and certainly, I am doing him a kind of justice here. At the constituent assembly, for example, Robespierre behaved well, and I admit that I have never been convinced why he changed. (Long uproar.)

Later the same session, Guadet used Robespierre’s former friendship with Pétion as a weapon against him apropos of getting accused of being an accomplice of Dumouriez: ”Can’t I say to Robespierre: You have had liaisons with Pétion, but you accuse Pétion of betraying the public sake.” […] Well! Since you have had liaisons with Pétion, I can therefore conclude you have been dans ses projets. Why then do you start by suppose me to have liaisons with Dumouriez, which is false, and conclude that since Dumouriez has turned traitor I must be considered one as well?” In the defense he wrote a few months later, the girondin Gensonné similarily stated: ”in 1791 and 1792, Robespierre had the most intimate liasons with Pétion, Buzot and Roland, how can he accuse them today without accusing himself?”

Pétion made good on his promise to start ”a written struggle,” as he soon thereafter released yet another pamphlet, this time by the name of Réponse très-succinte de Jérome Petion, au long libelle de Maximilien Robespierre (1793), a 14 page long work where he answered Robespierre’s attack from the 10th. Robespierre didn’t respond to it thank god.

On May 17, Desmoulins presented his 84 pages long Histoire des Brissotins, ou, Fragment de l'histoire secrète de la révolution, et des six premiers mois de la République to the Jacobin club, a pamphlet we know Robespierre had had a hand in through a note inserted in one of Desmoulins’ later publications. In total, Pétion’s name got mentioned a total of 22 times in the damning work that painted him and the other ”girondins” as royalists, accomplices of Dumouriez and in the pay of foreigners. They had been leading an anglo-prussian committee working for the military failure of France, which they wanted to divide into 20-30 federalist republics, or to overturn the republican government altogether, and to set up the Duke of Orléans as monarch. For Pétion’s part, Desmoulins threw suspicion on the fact that he, during his trip to London after the closing of the National Assembly, had been accompanied by Madame de Genlis (the cousin of the duke of Orléans), her niece Rose-Henriette Peronne de Sercey and daughter Pamela, ”that we can call the three graces, and who pressed his virtuous and fortunately incorruptible knee; and wasn’t it upon his return that he was appointed mayor of Paris?” Desmoulins also picked up Robespierre’s criticism of Pétion’s attitude towards the insurrection of August 10, but this time he got accused of not only not having wanted the event to take place, but also to have signed the order for the Swiss guard to fire on the people. He was also claimed to have received 30 000 francs per month from Dumouriez in order to ”throw away the foundations of the republic” during his time as mayor.

Desmoulins concluded that the establishment of a democratic republic wouldn’t happen before ”the vomiting of the Brissotins from the bosom of the Convention,” and on May 26, a week after the pamphlet’s publication, Robespierre had reached the same conclusion, telling the jacobins that ”the people must rise up. This moment has arrived.” Three days later he repeated himself — “I say that, if the people do not stand up as a whole, liberty is lost, and that only a detestable empiricist can tell them that there remains another doctor than themselves” — and two days after that, the insurrection of May 31 took place, which ended with the Convention on June 2 issuing arrest warrants against 29 of its deputies and two ministers. One of these 31 men was of course Pétion, who was placed under house arrest like the others. It was however a very loose one, and many of the proscribed managed to get away. On June 24, Jeanbon Saint-André could report to the Convention that Pétion had escaped, after which he suggested bringing those still remaining under house arrest to actual prisons, a proposal which Robespierre supported.

Having gone underground (while his wife, child and father all got arrested and his mother-in-law executed), Pétion occupied himself with writing, both his memoirs as well as Observations de Pétion, a constructive criticism of the poem Charlotte Corday, tragédie en 5 actes et en vers, that his fellow runaway Jean-Baptiste Salle had penned down. ”Barère and Robespierre,” Pétion wrote in these, ”are known for being the greatest cowards on earth. In my view, the trick is Barère's distinctive character. Robespierre is no less perfidious; but what distinguishes him is that in danger he loses his head, he discovers in spite of himself the fear which torments him, he speaks only of assassinations, only of lost liberty, he sees the entire Republic destroyed in his person, whereas Barère, more dissimulated, without being less cowardly, is always coldly atrocious and preserves until the end the hope of succeeding.” Buzot, who was hiding out alongside Pétion, did on the other hand recall the latter’s former fondness of Robespierre in the memoirs he at the same time was working on: ”there was this great difference between Pétion and me — he had a particular deference for Robespierre, and I had an invincible aversion for this man who had the face of a cat.”

Robespierre for his part had no nice things to say about Pétion. On March 21 1794 he reminded the Jacobins how Lafayette, Pétion and Dumouriez had all conceived ”the terrible project of starving and enslaving [the people]” but that luckily these ”monsters” had now fallen. A few days later, April 1 1794, he shut down a proposal that the recently arrested Danton be allowed to come and defend himself before the Convention by pointing out that this was not the first time a former ”patriot” turned out to be a traitor  — ”And I too was a friend of Pétion; as soon as he unmasked himself, I abandoned him; I also had liaisons with Roland; he betrayed, and I denounced him. Danton wants to take their place, and in my eyes he is nothing more than an enemy of the homeland.” Finally, on June 27 1794 he talked about yet another conspiracy, and regretted that it would be hard to make ”so many horrors” perceptible to the people that once ”were seduced by the Lameths, the d'Orléans, the Brissots, the Pétions, the Héberts.”

On June 17 1794, Pétion, Buzot and Barbaroux left the garret in Saint-Émilion where they since five months back had been hiding out, after the people taking care of them had gotten arrested, and set out into the countryside. When in the next day some people approached, Pétion and Buzot took flight once more while Barbaroux unsuccessfully tried to blow his brains out and was captured. Eventually his friends decided to take the same way out. It is unclear when exactly this suicide took place, tradition placing it on June 18 and Michel Biard, in the book La liberté ou la mort: mourir en député 1792-1795(2015) instead dating it to June 24, having consulted two doctors with expertise in the field. Regardless, on July 8 1794, the Moniteur published the following letter from the Popular Society of Castillon that had been read at the Convention the day right before:

Citizen Representatives, our search has not been in vain. When we annonced to you that the scroundel Barbaroux had been taken, we assured you that his accomplices Pétion and Buzot would soon be under our control. We’ve got them now, Citizen Representatives, or rather they are no more. The end which the law prescribes was too good for such traitors; divine justice reserved for them a fate more fitting to their crimes. We found their bodies, hidden and disfigured, half eaten by worms; their scattered limbs had been devoured by dogs, their bloody hearts eaten by ferocious beasts. Such was the horrible end of their still more horrible lives. People! Contemplate this awful spectacle, the terrible monument to your vengeance! Traitors! May this ignominious death, may this abhorred memory make you recoil with horror and shudder with terror! Such is the terrible fate which sooner or later will be reserved for you. Signed The Sans-Culottes of the Popular and Republican Society of Castillon.

By the time the letter reached Paris, Robespierre had already stopped showing up at both the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. But he probably still found out about what had happened, if not through the letter to the Convention, then through another one written to him on June 30 by Marc Antoine Jullien, representative on mission in Bordeaux, asking ”to raze to the ground the houses where Guadet, Salle, Pétion, Buzot and Barbaroux were [hiding], [and] transfer the military commission to Saint-Emilion, to there judge and make perish on the spot the authors or accomplices guilty of hiding the conspirators.” While we lack the sources to say anything really substantial about Robespierre’s psyche, it is nevertheless interesting to speculate if the news of his former friend’s horrible fate (as can be seen from the letter to the Convention, it isn’t even explained that Pétion and Buzot had committed suicide before getting mauled by the animals) was a contributing factor to Robespierre’s growing isolation from public life and deteriorating mental health during his last month alive…

[nesiacha]

I already talk about horrible movie about the frev. Today I will make a critic about the bad points about a good movie with a very good historical accuracy that I really like but it’s also important to criticize good historical films even if we liked them as a whole (I must say that I liked them personally and I continue to do so) . Firstly, even if it may not have been the intention, because it was not the theme of the show as the writers had planned several themes with the people, including the Night of Varennes, I didn't like that the politicians were seen prominently while the people were too much in the background (minor criticism because the show was discontinued after the success of 'La Terreur et la Vertu,' so maybe they intended to do it later).

Next, the women of the French Revolution are too sidelined, and Lucile Desmoulins is portrayed more as simply worried for Camille Desmoulins without showing Lucile's political side, which accentuates the sexism. Camille Desmoulins is depicted as more naive than he actually was, in my opinion, perhaps to absolve or infantilize him, I don't know.

I would have liked it if we briefly mentioned the retaking of Lyon by Couthon, even just in passing. We have 4 representatives of the indulgent faction (Fabre d'Eglantine, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Philppeaux) compared to only 2 on the Hebertist side (Hébert and Chaumette). We only mention Vincent, Ronsin, and Momoro briefly, but I would have liked them to have the same amount of screen time. We should also see their trials and the fact that they were going to the guillotine instead of that, the topic is quickly dismissed.

Moreover, although Castelot and Decaux had a very good debate that I invite everyone to watch, there's something that bothers me. It is said that the CSP (Committee of Public Safety) is at fault for parodying justice against the indulgent, but as usual, we forget the parody done to the Hebertists and also forget that done to the Enragés like Jacques Roux when the CSP, the CSG (Committee of General Security), and the Convention relentlessly attacked him illegally to the point where he committed suicide. Double standard once again, and the parody of justice is justified a bit too much for my taste (which also executed many innocents like Lucile Desmoulins, Marie Françoise Goupil, even Chaumette who had, however, refused the insurrection of Hébert, Gobel, etc)...

Then to say that Barère is acting in good faith from Decaux's point of view? No seriously, I don't buy Barère's whitewashing, he's generally a weathervane (the only time the show mentions it from this side is when Danton says that Barère is for the tipping scale).

Another point is that I found Robespierre a bit too naive at times. In real life, he knows that deep down Danton is a dubious character, but he thinks that the Hebertist wave is more dangerous. It's a political calculation until he realizes that he underestimated the indulgent movement and will opt for a middle policy. There he is almost surprised by some of Danton's movements.

Finally, the end of 'La Terreur et la Vertu' is not bad and very emotionnal; there is an explanation that Saint Just did not move during the insurrection. But personally, I think that our five deputies certainly had scruples regarding the legality of the Convention, as has been said repeatedly, but they mainly hesitated because of it. If they were 100% against not moving against the Convention due to legality, they would have said so. My theory is that they felt exhausted and confused because 17 out of 49 sections had risen, which was a significant number but not enough to justify an uprising, not to mention they were at least somewhat legalistic.

Finally, I would have liked an explanation of why Hanriot was so loyal to Robespierre (we know this if we research the character a little, but a line or two of mention wouldn't have cost much), but I'm glad he wasn't demonized. Far from me the idea of wanting to put this excellent film on trial, but as I said earlier, it is also necessary to see the negative aspects of this film to have a better improvement of the content (although today it regresses even more).

I would have liked it if we also briefly saw Tinville refuse to prosecute Fleuriot Lescot; it would have added a little more humanity to his character (although I don't like Tinville at all, I find that he is always too caricatured to be believable. Fortunately, the TV movie shows his "human" side, but not enough).

The only problem is that I have the impression that they are telling the false message that the execution of Robespierre and his colleagues marks the end of the social revolution when in reality the coup de grace was not done for me. that with the execution of Romme and his friends (the episode of the execution of the Hébertists, Cordeliers, indulgents and of Robespierre and his colleagues was above all only a continuation of weakening between 'internal struggle') and the end of the frev was only after Bonaparte coup d'etat . After seeing that the show was suddenly stopped, perhaps the writers intended to rectify it.

A small gratuitous jab nonetheless from a line in a TV movie: Barras: You will take Robespierre and Saint Just.

Me: Wow, and does Couthon count for nothing, I guess? The poor has just been royally ignored."

[sieclesetcieux]

Saint-Just's letter to Camille Desmoulins in (May?) 1790

He mentions the Assemblée de Chauny, which took place in May 1790 according to this site.

ORIGINAL FRENCH

Monsieur,

Si vous étiez moins occupé, j'entrerais dans quelques détails sur l'Assemblée de Chauny, où se sont trouvés des hommes de toutes trempes et de tout calibre. Malgré ma minorité, j'ai été reçu. Le sieur Gellé, notre confrère au bailliage de Vermandois, m'avait dénoncé. On l'a chassé par les épaules. Nous avons vu là vos compatriotes MM. Saulce, Violette et autres, dont j'ai reçu beaucoup de politesse. Il est inutile de vous dire (car vous n'aimez pas la sotte louange) que votre pays s'enorgueillit de vous.

Vous avez su avant moi que le département était définitivement à Laon. Est-ce un bien, est-ce un mal pour l'une ou l'autre ville ? Il me semble que ce n'est qu'un point d'honneur entre les deux villes, et les points d'honneur sont très peu de chose presqu'en tout genre.

Je suis monté à la tribune, j'ai travaillé dans le dessein de porter le jour dans la question du chef-lieu : mais je ne suivis rien ; je suis parti chargé de compliments comme l'âne de reliques, ayant cependant cette confiance qu'à la prochaine législature je pourrai être des vôtres à l'Assemblée nationale.

Vous m'aviez promis de m'écrire, mais je prévois bien que vous n'en aurez pas eu le loisir. Je suis libre à l'heure qu’il est. Retournerai-je auprès de vous ou resterai-je parmi les sots aristocrates de ce pays-ci ?

Les paysans de mon canton étaient venus, alors de mon retour de Chauny, me chercher à Manicamp. Le comte de Lauraguais fut fort étonné de cette cérémonie rusti-patriotique. Je les conduisis tous chez lui pour le visiter. On nous dit qu'il est aux champs et moi cependant je fis comme Tarquin ; j'avais une baguette avec laquelle je coupai la tête à une fougère qui se trouva près de moi, sous les fenêtres du château, et sans mot dire nous fines volte-face.

Adieu, mon cher Desmoulins. Si vous avez besoin de moi, écrivez-moi. Vos derniers numéros sont pleins d'excellentes choses. Apollon et Minerve ne vous ont point encore abandonné, ne vous en déplaise. Si vous avez quelque chose à faire dire à vos gens de Guise, je les reverrai dans les huit jours à Laon où j'irai faire un tour pour affaires particulières.

Adieu encore, gloire, paix, et rage patriotique. Saint-Just.

Je vous lirai ce soir, car je ne vous parle de vos derniers numéros que par ouï-dire.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

I found a translation here, which I used as a basis for mine, but there are some mistakes I corrected and I made some stylistic changes.

Monsieur,

If you were less busy, I would give you more details about the Assembly of Chauny, where one can find men of considerable calibre and quality. I was received in spite of my minority. Sieur Gellé, our compatriot from the bailliage of Vermandois had denounced me. He was grabbed by the shoulders and thrown out. We saw your compatriots, M. Saulce, M. Violette and others, by whom I was received with great courtesy. There is no point telling you (because you don't like foolish praise) that your region is proud of you.

You have known before I did that the département is definitely fixed at Laon. Is that good or is that bad for one or other of the towns? It seems to me that it is no more than a point of honour between the two towns and points of honour are of little importance.

I took the tribune; I worked with the intention of carrying the [order of the] day on the question of the chef-lieu: but I did not follow on; I left, weighed down with compliments like the donkey burdened with relics (1), having however the confidence that at the next legislature I could be among you at the National Assembly.

You had promised to write to me, but I can well anticipate that you had no such leisure. I am free as of now. Should I return to you or remain amongst the foolish aristocrats in this part of the country?

The peasants from my canton came, when I returned from Chauny, to look for me at Manicamp. The Comte de Lauraguais was greatly astonished by this rustico-patriotic ceremony. I led them all to his home for a visit. They said that he was out in the fields and I, however, did like Tarquin, I had a cane [baguette (2)] with which I cut off the head of a nearby fern, beneath the windows of the castle, and without a word we left and returned.

Farewell, my dear Desmoulins. If you have need of me, write to me. Your latest issues are full of excellent things. Apollo and Minerva have not yet abandoned you, whether you like it or not. If you have anything to say to your people in Guise, I will be seeing them again within the next eight days in Laon where I will be going for particular matters.

Farewell again, glory, peace and patriotic rage.

Saint-Just

I will read you this evening, since I only tell you about your recent issues from hearsay.

(1) This is a reference to a fable by La Fontaine.

(2) The baguette (direct translation: stick - the word existed before the bread style!) was a very thin cane, very fashionable to carry at the time. You can see some examples here. I'm not sure how he managed to cut a plant with it though... I've never tried to do that lol. So I don't know if it implies it was a sword-cane or if it was thin enough to do it on its own.

He compares his gesture to that of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus who, according to Livy, silently cut off the heads of the tallest poppies as a demonstration to what his son had to do.

(This is, by the way, the scene we see reproduced at the beginning of Saint-Just et la force des choses, and why they changed the fern to poppies - so the allusion would be clearer.)

[sansterreurnivertu]

Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins were not just heterosexuals, and the former's loyalty to Robespierre, to the point of agreeing to be guillotined with him, seems to have been a form of sublimated homosexuality.

Daniel Guérin, "Homosexualité et révolution"

I'm not sure what the author is trying to say about Camille, because he is not mentioned at all after that in the article.

Considering that the example of SJ and Max follows, it is most likely that he refers to the fact that he died with Danton. (In fact, before his execution, Camille wrote that he would not hide the fact that he would die for his friendship with Danton and that he would be happy to die with him). But if so, I wonder why his name is not mentioned here. Due to the "manly Danton" myth, the author is hesitant to associate something queer with him?

(I don't know whether it is appropriate to say that the deaths of Camille (for Danton) and Saint-Just (for Robespierre) are "sublimated homosexuality". I don't know much about queer studies...)

It could also be his complicated relationship with Maxime (since that his name is mentioned here), or the author thought his "vice honteux" could be homosexuality (I know some people have made similar claims, but I don't see any conclusive evidence).

Or did Guérin discover something about Camille that we don't know?

[frevandrest]

i think i've only seen this mentioned once somewhere, but what do you think of the idea that camille desmoulins had bipolar disorder? is there any basis for it?

The truth is that it's impossible to diagnose people who are dead (not to mention people who lived at a time there was no concept of being bipolar). So in that sense, it's impossible to tell.

Diagnosing historical people is a tricky thing because (imo) it tells more about our own ideas of those people (and various conditions) than about them. That being said, it's sometimes tempting, especially for people who share a certain condition (medical or human condition) to recognize historical people who might fit it. And it can be very useful to speculate, because it questions the (very harmful) assumption about everyone being neurotypical, cis, straight, etc. in history, which is simply untrue.

When it comes to Camille... I saw this being mentioned more than once in informal spaces (like tumblr, LiveJournal), but I don't know if this is a theory proposed in academic circles. We can sure see mood swings in (what we know about) Camille, but tbh I don't know enough about being bipolar to say anything more. Let's remember that 18th century mainstream behaviour often included very passionate and emotional talk/writing, coupled with times of utter melancholy, crying and despair. What we know of Camille, as described by contemporaries, is that he was a bit more of that than the usual (or at least, he was perceived as such). So, I think we can say that Camille's behaviour was considered to be a bit more emotional or expressive or mood swingy than usual, so it's not surprising some people today might think of him as being possibly bipolar. But we just can't know for sure.

At the same time, I don't mind speculation and wondering, even in srs TM academic circles, let alone in an informal space like this one.

I just wish people are not gross about it (not saying that you implied anything like that, anon!) I mean on historians and others using perceived conditions to demonize historical people, or trying to base an explanation on historical events on individuals' state of mind, sexuality, etc by pathologizing it. And true, these claims are not always horrible, but it can easily slip into that territory, and it often does. And not (just) because it can easily be used to paint a specific picture that might not be correct, but also - and this is very important - because it often leads to pathologisation of mental conditions and sexuality. (Pathologisation shouldn't be used even for historical people one hates! Evil Robespierre who is evil because he is gay and autistic is not simply a slander of Robespierre - it is harmful to gay and autistic people because it implies evilness).

tl;dr: It is not possible to say if Camille was bipolar but I don't mind speculation, as long as people are not pathologizing it. Speculation can be useful for challenging the idea that everyone was cis, straight, neurotypical, etc. "unless proven otherwise", which is a harmful mindset in itself.

[thelastofthebookworms]

The Happy Family, Jean Honoré Fragonnard (c. 1775)

A Family Group in a Landscape, Francis Wheatley (c. 1775)

Honorable mentions even if they only have the one kid :

Portrait de Camille Desmoulins en Famille (Picture of Camille Desmoulins with his Family), Atelier de Jacques Louis David c. 1792)

Family Portrait, François Hubert Drouais (1756)

The best genre of family portrait is and will always be Husband With Multiple Kids Making Come Hither Eyes At His Wife

Barbara Krafft, Die Familie Anton von Marx 1803

Marie-Geneviève Bouliard,Monsieur Olive & family 1791

[enlitment]

Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre – doomed by the Revolution?

a second part of the answer to the ask kindly sent by @iron--and--blood - first part can be found here

Okay, so I tried to follow the sources and I ended up missing what is arguably the key question. I think that there is enough evidence that warrants seeing Camille and Maximilien’s relationship as a ‘friendship torn apart but the revolution’, but could it in fact be something more that the chain of events of the mid-1790s ended up destroying?

(aka the good old “were they gay?” question)

It’s probably not surprising to anyone that there is no conclusive evidence that would suggest that either of them was definitely queer or that they were involved in some kind of a relationship. For context, the French Constitutional Assembly did decriminalise homosexuality, since there was simply no mention of private same-sex relationships it in the penal code of 1791.

Of course, there would still be a stigma surrounding queerness, seeing how France was a Catholic country – well, up to that point. On the other hand, it is also important to remember that anyone who received a higher education at that time would be well versed in classical authors (Greek and Roman that is), so they would have a framework for a positively viewed queer attraction/relationship (I'm mostly thinking of a kind of Alcibiades/Socrates vibes here. I think it sort of fits? Well it does in my headcanon anyway...). Camille especially seemed to be really into classics, making references to classical authors, history or mythology in approximately every other sentence.

CAMILLE – VICES HONTEUX AND A POSSIBILE BICON

If we consider Camille, I think it is clear that he was attracted to women. I think that the historical sources show that he genuinely did love his wife - Lucile - although it may also be true he was bit of a cad. There is a whole deal with him and Lucile’s mother with whom he apparently exchanged some flirty letters? I honestly need to look into it more at some point.

That said, attraction to women of course doesn’t exclude attraction to men. The one thing that would suggest Camille might have pursued a same-sex relationships is the reference to “vices honteux“ (shameful vices), which Saint-Just claims were attributed to Camille by Danton. We also learn from Robespierre’s note that this refered to something that was ‘totally unrelated to the revolution’.

So we know it’s something that would be seen as ‘shameful’ behaviour, but nonetheless a private matter. Could it be interest in same-sex relationships? It’s of course hard to say, but the theory is not completely implausible. For a discussion about this, I recommend this article.

MAXIMILIEN – A CONFIRMED BACHELOR?

With Maximilien Robespierre, it gets a little more complicated. He was essentially a confirmed bachelor, living with a family that adored him but that was not his own (and also a dog. He had a dog.) Talk about a found family trope!

Some sources claim that he was engaged to Éléonore Duplay, but Robespierre’s sister for one vehemently denies this. It’s true that he could probably easily have married her – I can’t imagine her family being opposed to it, far from it probably – but the fact is that for one reason or another, he did not.

He also didn’t really seem to capitalise on his massive popularity among the Parisian women. (Though, to be fair, neither did Rousseau and he was… well I guess he was his own version of heterosexual.)

Sure, one can interpret that as Robespierre being a workaholic or putting the revolution above everything else, but I personally think it is very possible that he would be considered to be on the asexual spectrum by today’s standards.

That said, although France was moving away from institutionalised religion at that point, Catholic guilt could certainly play a role, especially in someone who prided himself in his moral conduct and was told to be rigid about the rules. So the possibility of him being closeted as an explanation for his lack of interest in women would also not be completely off the table.

As to Camille and Maximilien being together in some way? I think there is certainly a precedence for this type of relationship in adolescence. Seeing that they have studied together (and shared enthusiasm for classics probably), it is not impossible, though of course, it is highly speculative.

I think it is also fair to say that Robespierre went above and beyond for Camille until the last few months. That is something he probably would have not done for many other people. He actually said as much himself:

“Learn, Camille, that if you were not Camille, one could not have so much indulgence for you.“

Was it because Camille was universally liked by the revolutionaries for all the good he has done? Possibly, but I think one can also read more into it. It certainly suggests that Camille was special in some way, and the fact that Robespierre uses ‚one‘ instead of ‚I‘ does not necessarily mean he is not speaking about himself here.

CAMILLE AND MAXIMILIEN IN THE MEDIA

When it comes to media portrayal, the relationship often comes across as queer-coded - to an extent.

In La Révolution française, this aspect is more prominent between Robespierre and Saint-Just, but with some well-timed smiles and glances, it almost reads as a tragic love triangle between the three. There are some unfortunate implications however, mainly that the hints of Robespierre's queerness in the movie are implicitly associated with his descent to tyrany. Ugh. (And let's face it, a kind of effeminacy linked to villainy as well. Honestly, who thought that kind of portrayal would be a good idea? Kudos for making a historical movie about the French Revolution come across as homophobic I guess.)

Hilary Mantel straight-up makes Camille Desmoulins bisexual (ish?) in A Place of Greater Safety, though there are <a lot of> issues with that portrayal, as discussed here (watch me linking another mutual's great post! Frevblr is truly the best). Not sure how the relationship with Robespierre is presented here since it’s one of the books I’ve been in the middle of for months.

And then there’s Stanisława Przybyszewska of course. She would honestly warrant a separate post, but long story short: in her works, there is no doubt about the fact that she portrays the relationship between them as queer. She invokes the Erastes/eromenos dynamic between them (quite explicitly, referring to Camille as an ephebe at one point) and makes the attraction between the two seem palpable. There is plenty of queer (under)tones to be found in The Danton Case, but in Last Nights of Ventôse , she straight up interprets the fall of the Dantonists as Camille running into Danton’s arms to spite Robespierre for snubbing him and rejecting his devotion (romantic advances?). And it gets quite physical – not in a way that would warrant an E rating, but it would certainly deserve one for the sheer emotional intensity.

[drawn-and-talk-of-peace]

Camille and Lucile in “Ça ira, mon amour.” 

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Were Danton and Camille really as close as almost every biography/novel/movie, etc. makes them out to be? For a long time I believed they were best friends, but I realize that I don't know much about what really happened (only that Camille mentioned him as a friend several times in his letters).

Sorry if a similar question has already been asked, and thank you for all your wonderful posts. I read each one with great interest.

Thank you! I’m throwing in their wives too for good measure.

As popular as the idea of Danton and Desmoulins being friends already before the revolution is among novelists (A Place of Greater Safety (1992) by Hilary Mantel, The Gods Are Thirsty (1996) by Tanith Lee) and even biographers (Danton (2012) by David Lawday, Georges-Jacques Danton (1987) by Frank Dwyer) I have not been able to discover any evidence indicating this to actually have been the case. The very first connection I’ve found between the two dates to December 12 1789, when Desmoulins for the very first time mentions Danton’s name in his recently founded journal Révolutions de France et de Brabant:

As I do not have the advantage of being from the illustrious Cordeliers District, I am addressing this motion [to make it forbidden to use the term Queen of the French in public acts] to it through this journal. I beg its worthy President M. d'Anton to propose it to the honorable members, to discuss it in their wisdom and address it to the fifty-nine others; I leave my motion on their desks, and I sign it... A Frenchman.

The second time Camille mentions Danton’s name in Révolutions de France et de Brabant is eleven numbers later (March 1 1790). In the number, Camille describes how he on February 24 for the very first time enters the Cordeliers club and enrolls himself as a member. The very same session, he, alongside Danton, Fabre d’Eglantine, Paré and Dufourny de Villiers are named commissioners for the editing of a report by the club requesting the construction of a building ”worthy the National Assembly” on the place of the destroyed Bastille. This is the earliest confirmed meeting between Danton and Desmoulins that I’ve been able to find.

By the end of the same month, in number 17 (March 20) and number 18 (March 29) of Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Camille loudly protests against the fact Danton (”this lustrous president of the Cordeliers district”) has been decreed under arrest by le Châtelet de Paris, accused of having threatened to ring the tocsin in order to mobilize the Faubourg Saint−Antoine for the defense of his district when the National Guard came by:

If you put on trial a citizen who has put forward an extravagant opinion in his district, you will therefore also have to put on trial, with much more reason, the judge who, in his company, has opined in an extravagant manner; it will therefore be necessary to hang the judge who will have sentenced to death an accused whom the majority will have absolved, since this judge will have approved the death of an innocent person, which is much worse than making an extravagant motion in a district.

Desmoulins brings up Danton in Révolutions de France et de Brabant a few more times throughout the rest of 1790, calling him both ”the lustrous Danton” (number 31, June 28, number 35, July 26) as well as the more bombastic ”the most robust athlete of the patriots, the only tribune of the people who could have been heard in the Champ-de-Mars, and with his voice rally the patriots around the tribune, the only man whose veto the aristocracy had to fear, and in whom it could have found both the Gracchi brothers and a Marius.” (number 44, September 27). When Danton in the fall is appointed judge at Saint-Germain, Camille celebrates (number 47, October 18):

The Philoctetes of Hercules, d’Anton, is also appointed judge at Saint-Germain. He is well worthy of sitting next to M. Le Grand de Laleu. Honor to the city of Saint-Germain! Based on these two choices we can only augur well for the others. I would be tempted to believe that our patriarch Robe did so many readings of his poem on the revolution there, that he inflamed all the voters with a patriotism which dictated to them these excellent choices. The Parisians, ungrateful, forgot in the elections Danton, and Abbé Fauchet, and Brissot, and Carra, and Manuel; but it seems that the surrounding districts were responsible for the recognition.

On December 27 1790 Danton, alongside twelve other well known ”patriots,” signed the Desmoulins couple’s wedding contract. He was however not present for the actual wedding ceremony two days later, something which I suppose could be read as implying he and Desmoulins were not that close yet. On the other hand, the way Desmoulins does describe his wedding witnesses in a letter to his father written five days later (”Péthion [sic] and Robespierre, the elite of the National Assembly, M. de Sillery who wanted to be there, and my two colleagues Brissot de Warville and Mercier, the elite among the journalists”), it almost sounds like he’s chosen them less out of friendship and more out of prestige, so maybe this doesn’t have to mean that much either… After the wedding, Camille and Lucile moved to Rue du Théâtre 1 (today Rue de l’Odeon 28) roughly a ten minute walk from the Dantons’ apartment on 20 cour du Commerce-Saint-André (today destroyed). The ease with which they would come and go between these two apartments will be seen through Lucile’s diary 1792-1793.

In number 63 (February 7 1791) of Révolutions de France et de Brabant, Camille celebrates the fact that ”the excellent patriot Danton” has become a member of the department of Paris — ”If there is only one patriot of this caliber in the 83 departments, all the projects of our enemies from within and without will fail against his firmness, his ascendancy, his vigilance and his incorruptibility.” In a letter to La Marck dated March 10 1791, Mirabeau claimed to ”have evidence Danton was behind (a fait faire)the latest number of Camille-Desmoulins,” which, regardless of whether the charge was true, suggests a certain closeness between the two at this point. In number 72 (April 11) Camille exclaims: ”how the true jacobin Danton made blush the adulators that his excellency had already found.” Two numbers after that (April 25), he celebrates Danton’s actions the 18th the same month, the day the royal family tried to leave for Saint-Cloud but was stopped by a mob. In the number, Camille writes that Danton told him how he on the day in question had found himself at the Departemnt when Bailly and La Fayette came there to demand permission to proclaim martial law and order the National Guards to fire on the crowd surrounding the royal family if necessary. Danton had successfully intervened and reduced them to silence. Camille praises this move in the number:

Courage, dear Danton! how much the patriotic writers must congratulate themselves today, who fought with obstinacy to praise you, and constantly nominated you for the votes of the people. By the parallel of your tribunitian eloquence, of your incorruptibility, of your masculine courage, with the academic and lachrymatory sentences of the courtier Bailly and his telescope which would have made us fall into the well with the astronomer in a scarf, continue to cover with shame all the citizens who gave him votes due to your patriotism.

In the same number, Camille also attributed to Danton and Kersaint an address placing the blame on what had happened on the 18th not on the people, but on the king: ”The same day the department of Paris presented the king with an address, the first, perhaps, which was written in the style of a free people. Also, it had been written by Danton and Kersaint: [transcription of the address].” According to Danton (1978) by Normann Hampson, Camille is however mistaken here, as the adress had actually been written by Talleyrand and Pastoret…

In the next number (May 2 1791) Camille writes the following, which I’m not sure how to interpret, but which Hervé Leuwers reads as assassins having been after both Camille, Danton and Fréron when the three were walking home a week earlier: ”I have learned that four assassins waited for me Tuesday evening (April 26), until midnight. Me, D’anton [sic] and the Orator of the People (Fréron).” In number 81 (June 18 1791) he lifts Danton, Garran de Coulon and Manuel as ”the candidates whom I would most strongly recommend to the 83 departments, for the next legislature.”

In number 82 (June 27 1791), Camille writes that, eleven o’clock in the evening of June 20, ”I was walking home from the Jacobins together with Danton and other patriots. We only saw but one patrol the whole way. Paris seemed so abandoned to me that night that I could not help but remark on it. One of us (Fréron according to Leuwers) who had in his pocket a letter which I will speak about, which warned him that the King had to leave that night, wanted to observe the castle, he saw M. Lafayette enter it at 11 o'clock.” The next morning, Paris woke up to the discovery that the royal family had indeed left the capital during the night. The very same day, Camille goes to the Jacobin club and arrives in the middle of Robespierre holding a speech about the current situation which moves him deeply. After him, Danton mounts the rostrum, and about the same time Lafayette enters the club. Danton delivers a speech blaming him for the king’s flight and asking he explains himself that Camille records in the journal. At the end of the speech, Alexandre Lameth rises to support Lafayette, recalling that he has always thought Lafayette would fall at the head of the patriots in case of a counter-revolution.

Danton came back to sit down next to me. Is it possible? I said to him. Yes, [he answered], and rising up, he confirmed that M. Alexandre Lameth had always said this to him about M. La Fayette. My blood boiled. I was tempted to cry out to Alexandre Lameth: you used very different language with me; and I declare that almost everything I wrote at La Fayette, I wrote, if not under your dictation, at least under your guarantee. But Danton held me back.

While all of this was going down, Lucile Desmoulins and Gabrielle Danton was staying at the apartment of the latter, something which we know through a letter Lucile wrote her mother on either June 24 or June 25, when the royal family had been captured and was on their way back to Paris. Unfortunately I have not been able to transcribe it in its entirety, but these are all the places mentioning Gabrielle that I could find:

…Ever since papa came with [warnings?] to us madame Danton and I have not left each other. I would have [gone crazy?] had I remained alone. These three days we have left [her place?] only at 9 o’clock [in the evening?] Sometimes people came to tell us that we were lost, and when we were told good news, madame Danton, her eyes filled with tears, threw herself around my neck. I’ve supped at her place during this time and [with?] all the patriots. […] Oh God o God, I’m going to send your beautiful  [p..?] to madame Danton.

On July 15 the Jacobins entrusted Brissot with writing a petition asking for the abdication of Louis XVI. The session was closed at midnight. Afterwards, Camille, Danton, Brune and La Poype all went over to Danton’s house to further discuss the petition (this was revealed by Brune in an interrogation held August 12 1791, published in number 34 (August 26) of the journal Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux). Two days later, the two were there once again, this time together with Fréron, Fabre, Santerre, Brune, Duplain, Momoro and Sergent-Marceau, and discussing the lynching of two men at the Champ-de-Mars the same morning, when, at nine o’clock, Legendre arrived and told the group that two men had come home to him and said: We are charged with warning you to get out of Paris, bring Danton, Camille and Fréron, let them not be seen in the city all day, it is Alexandre Lameth who engages this. Camille, Danton and Fréron follow this advice and leave, and were therefore most likely not present for the demonstration and shootings on Champ-de-Mars the very same day (this information was given more than forty years after the fact by Sergent-Marceau in volume 5 of the journal Revue rétrospective, ou Bibliothèque historique : contenant des mémoires et documens authentiques, inédits et originaux, pour servir à l'histoire proprement dite, à la biographie, à l'histoire de la littérature et des arts (1834)).

In the aftermath of the massacre on Champ de Mars, arrest warrants were issued against people deemed guilty for them. On July 22, the Moniteur reports that the journalists Suleau and Verrières have been arrested, and that the authorities have also fruitlessly gone looking for Fréron, Legendre, Desmoulins and Danton, the latter three, the journal assures, having already left Paris. Camille hid out at Lucile’s parents’ country house in Bourg-la-Reine together with Fréron, while Danton went to Arcis-sur-Aube, where he was sheltered by his friend Courtois, and then to Troyes (it’s also commonly stated he went to England during this period, but Hampson expresses some doubt over it). If Camille’s fellow journalist Louis Marie Prudhomme’s Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution (1797) is to be believed, on August 14, Danton told Camille and Fabre d’Églantine: the ”b.... won't have me; rather they will all be exterminated first.”

The rather flimsy charges against Danton and Camille — Danton was accused of having cheered on a crowd demanding Lafayette’s head on June 21, Camille of having made incendiary remarks at Café Procope café, saying that it was necessary to shoot the national guards — were however dropped after about six weeks, and in September 1791 they were both back in Paris to stand for election to the Legislative Assembly. Neither did however get in. Camille had also had to resign as journalist in the aftermath of the massacre on Champ-de-Mars.

In Histoire des Montagnards (1847) Alphonse Esquiros writes that Albertine Marat had told him that her brother, Danton and Desmoulins ”liked to come together, from time to time, to rest their souls in the sweet serenity of nature”:

In this contrast of the noise of revolutions with the silence, with the serious serenity of a sunset, under the trees, at the water's edge, a league from Paris, the three friends then had before their eyes the two faces eternal aspects of the world, history and nature, God in movement and God at rest. Danton, this eloquent thunderbolt, this large head of a genius on which smallpox had left big marks, Danton ordered dinner. Whatever efforts one agreed to make during the frugal meal, to keep irritating subjects out of the conversation, one was obliged to go there at dessert; because the company was too preoccupied with the dangers of the State not to mix public affairs with their most personal conversations.

When the question of war in December 1791 became the main topic of discussion, both Danton and Desmoulins joined the minority that cautioned against it. Already on December 16, right after Brissot had held his very first speech in favour of the idea, Danton, while praising the speaker as an excellent patriot, objected to the thought of a war right at the moment — ”I want us to have war; it is essential. We must have war. But above all, we have to exhaust the means that could save us from it.” Ten days later, December 26, Desmoulins did him too deliver a speech against war. Four days after that, after Brissot had just finished his second speech on the subject, Danton and Robespierre both demanded a change be made to a passage when it got printed. Following this moment, it would however appear Danton abandons the question. Camille on the other hand released the pamphlet Jean Pierre Brissot démasqué in February 1792, mocking Brissot and painting him as a fool. Danton’s name got mentioned three times throughout, Camille calling him and Robespierre ”the best citizens.” Danton also got mentioned a total of eight times in the journal La Tribune des Patriots Camille and Fréron published from April to June the very same year, but not in any way that could give us more insight into their relationship.

In her memoirs, Manon Roland claims that Danton and Fabre d’Églantine in the summer of 1792 often came home to her. At one point Fabre told her that “We have a newspaper project which we will call Compte rendu au Peuple souverain, and which will present the picture of the last revolution. Camille Desmoulins, Robert, etc, work on it.” Manon suggested they bring it to her husband for him to subsidise it, something which the two apparently never did, and there was no more talk of the journal again.

On June 23 1792 Lucile starts keeping a diary. The first time any of the Dantons show up in it is already on Wednesday June 27 — ”Madame D(anton) came, we played music.” A few days later Lucile gives this rather odd account: ”My head is spinning. I was madame D(anton) after dinner.” The day after that, July 6, she gives birth to her first child, and a week later, Camille writes to tell his father that said child ”was immediately sent to a wetnurse in Isle-Adam, with the little Danton” (François-Georges, born February 2 1792). If Camille and Lucile made a conscious choice of sending their son to the same wetnurse as Georges and Gabrielle’s (perhaps on the suggestion of their friends) one can only speculate in.

A week after Camille wrote his letter, Lucile traveled to her parents’ country house in Bourg-la-Reine. On July 25 Camille writes to tell her that ”I was brought to Chaville this morning by Panis, together with Danton, Fréron, Brune, at Santerre’s” (letter cited within Camille et Lucile Desmoulins: un rêve de république). Lucile returned to Paris on August 8. In a diary entry written four months later she reveals that she, in the afternoon of August 9, together with others went over to the Dantons. ”Her mother was crying, she was sad, her father looked dazed. D(anton) was resolute. As for me, I was laughing like a madwoman! They feared that the affair [the insurrection of August 10] would not take place; although I was not at all sure, I told them, as if I knew it well, that it would take place. “But can we laugh too?” mde D(anton) said to me. ”Alas, I said to her, that presages to me that I will perhaps shed a lot of tears this evening!” At the end of the day, Lucile, Gabrielle (and others?) go home to Gabrielle’s mother to go for a walk and eventually sit down next to a cafe with her. When groups of sans-culottes and troops on horseback pass by, Lucile gets scared and tells Gabrielle that they should go. ”She laughed at my fear, but by dint of telling her, she too became scared and we left. I say to her mother: ”Farewell! You will soon hear the toscin sound!” The two go back to Gabrielle’s apartment, where a scared Lucile eventually admits to Camille she doesn’t want him to get involved in the dangerous insurrection — ”He reassured me by telling me that he would not leave D(anton).” Lucile and Gabrielle are soon left alone in the apartment with Louise de Kéralio-Robert, but after only a little while Danton returns home and goes to bed. This eventually upsets Louise who tells Lucile that if her husband dies in the insurrection she will stick a knife in Danton. ”From that moment on I never left her. What did I know what could happen? To know what she was capable of…” Some additional time later Camille returns to the apartment and falls asleep on Lucile’s shoulder. Louise tells her that “I can’t stay here any longer! Madame D(anton) is unbearable to me, she seems to be calm, her husband does not want to expose himself!” Lucile therefore suggests she come with her and Camille to their apartment to get some rest. When they around noon go back to the Dantons’ place again ”Madame D(anton) ran up to us to see how we were, she was soon informed when she saw the silence of one and the tears of the other. We waited long enough without knowing anything. Finally they came to tell us that we were victorious.” In a letter to her mother penned down the very same day, Lucile, similarly to how she described them during the Flight to Varennes, writes: ”Mme Danton and I do not leave each other, when I would have liked to flee it would have been impossible, the women are kept from going out.” The following night Camille and Lucile sleep over at the Roberts. When Lucile returns home on the 12th she learns that Danton has been appointed minister of justice. ”These news gave me great pleasure, especially when C(amille) came to tell me that he was secretary.” One day later Camille writes a letter revealing the very same news to his father:

My friend Danton has become minister thanks to the canon. This bloody day could only end, for the two of us especially, in being raised or hoisted together. He said to the national assembly: If I had been defeated, I would have been a criminal. The cause of liberty has triumphed, and Danton has associated me to his triumph.

According to Prudhomme’s Histoire générale et impartiale… (1797), it was Camille and Fabre themselves who three o’clock in the morning announced to Danton that he had been named minister of justice, after which they demanded he make them his secretaries:

”But, are you sure that I am appointed minister?” [said Danton].  “Yes,” replied the two midshipmen; and we will not leave you until we have your word for these two places.” ”Right on time,” said Danton. And everything was arranged according to the wishes of the two revolutionary patriots; but all this does not praise their disinterestedness.

After Camille and Danton had gotten their new occupations, both families briefly went to live at Hôtel de Bourvallais. Lucile writes:

I really liked it there, but only one thing bothered me, it was Fréron. Every day I saw new progress and didn’t know what to do about it. I consulted Maman, she approved of my plan to banter and joke about it, and that was the wisest thing to do. Because what to do? Forbid him to come? He and C(amille) dealt with each other every day, we would meet. To tell him to be more circumspect was to confess that I knew everything and that I did not disapprove of him; an explanation would have been needed. I therefore thought myself very prudent to receive him with friendship and reserve as usual, and I see now that I have done well. Soon he left to go on a mission. I was very happy with it, I thought it would change him. But many other cares to be taken… I realized that D(anton)… Oh, of that one, I was suspicious! I had to fear the eyes of his wife with whom I did not want to be hurt. I did so well that one did not know that I had noticed it, and the other that it might be. We spent three months like this quite cheerfully. At the end of this time C(amille) was appointed deputy and we returned to our first home.

Somewhere during Camille and Danton’s time in the ministry we find the following undated letter ”from the minister of justice to citizen Desmoulins, national commissioner in Vervins” (Camille’s father). Charles Vellay, who published the letter in 1792, did however find it more likely for the author of the letter, unlike what the header leads you to believe, was Camille, seeing as it is in a secretary’s handwriting and the letter was found among his and not Danton’s papers:

I am pleased to learn, Citizen, that yielding to the wishes of your compatriots, you have accepted the position of Natal Commissioner at the Vervins District Tribunal. You could undoubtedly desire some rest after the long fatigues you have had and the feeling which invited you to retire was very legitimate; but it was worthy of your good citizenship to still make the sacrifice for your country, and I am convinced that it was not in the midst of the agitations which precede the most beautiful of centuries that you would have left without regret a career where you you still have services to render to public affairs for a long time to come. It is not fair, however, to forget that the more you redouble your efforts, the more it is in your fellow citizens' interest to prescribe reasonable limits for yourself, and it is also your duty to moderate your zeal and not to forbid you these considerations which can be reconciled with public service and the care of your health. Your colleagues will themselves urge you to give nature the moments of relaxation it needs; a few temporary absences can be infinitely useful to you, and certainly they will not harm the interests of business if some attention is given to the circumstances and replacement measures. I will approve the first of wise precautions which I feel the necessity of and sure of my attachment to your duties I will rely with confidence on your respect for this moral responsibility as sacred as the will of the laws to true republicans.

Danton would however not remain minister of justice for a long time, already on August 26 Camille reported to his father that:

It seems that several departments will nominate me and especially Danton [to the National Convention], and he will not hesitate for a moment to leave the ministry to be representative of the people. You can imagine that I would follow an example that I would have given him, if I were in his place. Danton is from Paris no more than I am, and it is a remarkable thing that among all the principal authors of the revolution and among all of our friends, we perhaps do not know a single one who was born in Paris.

However, before the opening of the National Convention, the so called September Massacres took place. In l’Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs… (1797) Prudhomme attributed big responsibility for the prison killings to both Danton and Desmoulins, portraying them as aware of what was going to happen already on September 2, the day before they began:

September 2, at midday, I go, hearing the noise of the tocsin and the cannon of alarm, to my section de l'Unité.  People came to announce that the barriers had been closed. A general consternation was painted on all faces. At the news of the arrival of the Prussians in Paris, as well as of a conspiracy of the prisoners against the patriots (a vague rumor had been circulating about it for fifteen days), a number of citizens questioned me on this subject.  ”Your profession as a journalist should enable you to know something,” one said to me.  ”I know nothing,” I responded, ”but I’m going to visit someone who could tell me.” As I knew Camille Desmoulins since a long time back, I thought it a good idea to go to his house. I didn’t find him anywhere, one assured me that he was at Danton’s, minister of justice. It was about half past two in the afternoon, I went home to the minister, and told him: ”I have come, in the quality of pure patriotism and in my own name, to ask you what this canon of alarm, this toscin and the arrival of the Prussians to Paris.”  ”Calm down, old friend of liberty,” Danton responded, ”it’s the toscin of victory.”  ”But,” I told him, ”people talk about slitting throats.”  ”Yes,” he told me, ”we were all about to have our throats cut this night, starting with the most patriotic. All those arisocrat rascals, who are in the prisons, had been provided with firearms and daggers. At a specified time next night, the gates were to be opened to them; they would have spread in different quarters to cut the throats of the wives and children of the patriots who will leave to march against the Prussians. We addressed ourselves principally, above all, to those who had demonstrated the principles of freedom.” ”All this comes off as a bit made up to me,” I responded, ”but what means are to be employed to prevent the execution of such a plot?” ”What means?” he said. ”The People, irritated and instructed in time, want to do justice themselves to all the bad subjects inside the prisons.” At these words I was seized with horror; I told him that such a measure appeared to me unworthy of a people who claimed to be free. At this moment, Camille Desmoulins entered.  ”Hello there!” Danton said to him. ”Prudhomme just asked me what is to be done.  ”Yes,” I said, ”and I am heartbroken after what I have just heard. ”So you (tu) didn’t tell him that one won’t mix up the innocent with the guilty? Camille said to Danton. ”All those who will be claimed by their sections will be returned.”  ”Seems to me that we could take a less violent measure,” I responded. ”Spilling blood is an abominable act of which those who govern are responsible. The people will one day make those who make them commit this crime pay dearly. Let Paris march en masse against the Prussians. Send the wives and children of those who are to march at the enemy out of Paris to avoid them getting massacred by the prisoners, let us lock them up in fortified castles.”  ”Any kind of moderate measure is useless,” Danton said. ”The anger of the people is at its height, there would even be danger in stopping it.” His first anger assuaged, one could make him listen to reason.  ”But,” I say, ”if the Legislative body and the constituted authorities spread themselves through Paris, and harangued the people?” ”No, no,” replied Camille, ”that would be too dangerous; for the people, in their first wrath, might make victims in the person of their dearest friends.” I withdrew filled with pain. 

Exiting Danton’s house, Prudhomme adds:

As I passed through the dining room, I saw the wives of Camille, Danton, Robert, etc, Fabre-d'Eglantine, and other guests. I did not know what to think of the tranquility that reigned at the house of the Minister of Justice; everything led me to believe that it was indeed impossible to stop the resentment of the People, at the news of a conspiracy hatched by the nobles and priests. 

The next day, Prudhomme also claims that Théophile Mandar went over to Danton’s place, where he saw ”all ministers, with the exception of Roland, Lacroix, president [of the Assembly], Pétion, mayor of Paris, Robespierre, Camille-Desmoulins, Fabre d’Églantine, Manuel and several members of the so-called Commune of August 10. The presidents and commanders from each of the 48 sections had come as well.” Half past seven in the evening everyone sat down in Danton’s salon to discuss the means to save Paris, Danton staying firm in his conviction of what had just happened and was still happening as necessary.

On September 8, two days after the end of the massacres, the time had come for Camille to be elected to the National Convention. He did at first come under question for his friendship with the royalist journalist François Suleau, killed in the Insurrection of August 10. The journal Gazette nationale de France does however report that Camille after this ”was defended with a lot of energy and eloquence by M. Danton and his election was almost unanimous.” With that, Desmoulins became the sixth elected deputy representing Paris (Danton was the second).

In December 1792, Lucile returns to keeping a diary. On the 22nd she writes: ”I went to supper with little Brune at mde D(anton’s). How detestable she is!” It’s hard to tell if it’s Gabrielle or madame Brune she designates as detestable, and even harder to know what she had done in order to get called that… Two days later, December 24, Lucile documents the following:

We had dinner at mde D(anton's), mde R(obert), B(rune) and B(oyer) were there. After dinner the men asked themselves if they should go to the Jacobins. They said yes. We were asked if we would go. We say no. Madame D(anton) said to me: ”do you (vous) want to spend the evening with me?,” I said yes, but soon I did not know what to do. Brune suggested I go to the theater! It was very embarrassing. Madame Brune said aloud: “I have never been to the Jacobins, I would be very happy to go there.” "Well, I'm going with you," I tell her. Finally, here we are, all ready to leave, when I see Mme Brune and Boyer whispering in each other’s ears. I, like a fool, go to ask them what they’re saying to each other. Mde R(obert) told me that she was very embarrassed, that she would like to go with us to the Jacobins. I was very kind, I said a few words to her that meant nothing, then I went into the antechamber. She came there soon and told me to wait for her, that she was going to follow me, she came back near madame D(anton). Brune came and told me “let’s go”. I followed her saying: ”but mde R(obert) who wants to come?” Finally, we are hardly in the middle of the staircase when we hear someone who says “here they are, here they are!”, then we descend with astonishing speed, and when we are in the street we run even harder. We took a fairly long detour. God knows how we laughed! Nothing, too, was more comical.

Throughout the first two halves of January, Lucile goes to the Convention to follow the trial of Louis XVI every single day. If Gabrielle went with her to these sessions is not confirmed, but not disproven either. Danton was absent on a mission in Belgium for most of the trial, but on January 14 he returned to Paris and two days later he voted for death, just like Camille. One day after the execution of the king, January 22 1793, Lucile writes: ”I went to Robert’s. Danton came there. His jokes are as boorish as he is. Despite this, he is a good devil. Madame Ro(bert) seemed jealous of how he teased me…” Two days later she witnesses the funeral procession of the recently assassinated Michel Peletier from the window of Jeanne-Justine Boyer, an event which moves her deeply. Once all her guests have left for the evening ”I felt that I could not be alone and bear the horrible thoughts that were going to besiege me. I ran to D(anton’s). He was moved to see me still pale and defeated. We drank tea, I supped there.” A week later, January 29, Lucile reports that ”we had dinner at D(anton's), where I just laughed, because I was preventing Brune from eating by saying "poa, poa, poa". D(anton) too couldn't keep himself from laughing.” Four days after that, February 3, Lucile writes ”I went to see madame Danton. Sick.” Three days later, she goes back to see her friend — ”I went to see madame Danton… She is very ill.” Yet another three days later Lucile writes ”Madame Danton is ill. She has given birth to a girl.” and at last, the day after that: ”I had dinner with Maman. Madame Danton is dead.” Two days after the death of her friend, Lucile goes to visit Gabrielle’s mother together with madame Brune and Robert. Shortly after that, she and Camille do however leave for Essonne, the latter having been apointed to a mission there, while Georges returned to Paris after another mission in Belgium to receive the sad news. Lucile did however not forget about him, in a letter to her mother Annette dated February 16 she asks her to ”give us news regarding Danton.” Apropos of Annette eventually joining them in Essonne Lucile adds: ”I forgot to mention a facility that could be of use for you, it’s Danton’s carriage. No doubt he could still have it.”

On March 26 1793, Desmoulins and Danton were both elected for the so called Commission of Public Safety, alongside 23 others. The commission, which consisted of both fervent montagnards and fervent girondins, was however off to a rocky start, and already on April 6 it was put to death and replaced by the Committee of Public Safety. A little more than a month later, May 17, Desmoulins announced the release of his new pamphlet l’Histoire des Brissotins to the Jacobins. Danton’s name gets mentioned eleven times in it, but only one can be used to really say something about their relationship, and it’s when Camille on page 54 writes: ”Jérôme Pétion told Danton in confidence that ”what makes poor Roland saddest is the fact people will discover his domestic sorrows and how bitter being a cuckold is to the old man, troubling the serenity of that great soul.” This implies Danton went and shared Roland’s secret with Camille after Pétion had confided it to him. Two weeks later, on June 7, a ”member” is recorded to have voiced suspicion on Danton’s current sentiments — ”This deputy isn’t as revolutionary as he used to. He doesn’t come to the Jacobins anymore. He left me the other day to approach a general.” In response, Camille is recorded to have ”advocated Danton’s good citizenship.” In Lettre de Camille Desmoulins, député de Paris à la Convention, au général Dillon en prison aux Madelonettes released a few months later, Camille calls Robert Lindet, Robespierre and Danton ”the best citizens of the Convention.”

On October 30, 22 girondins were sentenced to death. In Les mysterès de la mère de Dieu dévoilès(1794) Joachim Vilate described a dramatic reaction from Camille’s part upon hearing the final verdict: ”hearing the juror's declaration, he suddenly threw himself into my arms, agitated, tormenting himself:”ah my god, my god, it's me who kills them: my Brissot dévoilé [sic], ah my god, it’s that which kills them.” If Dominique-Joseph Garat’s Memoirs of the revolution; or, an apology for my conduct, in the public employments which I have held (1795) are to be believed, Danton too was deeply moved by the fate of the girondins, to the extent it motivated him to, on October 12, ask for a leave of absence to go to Arcis-sur-Aube in order to recruit his health:

I could not convince myself that among all those who, since May 31, had retained great popularity, there was not one who did not still retain a little humanity, and I went to Danton. He was ill, it only took me two minutes to see that his illness was above all a deep pain and a great dismay at everything that was coming. ”I won't be able to save them (the girondins)”, were the first words out of his mouth, and, as he uttered them, all the strength of this man, who has been compared to an athlete, was defeated, big tears strolled down his face, whose shapes could have been used to represent that of Tartarus. […] When the fate reserved for the twenty-two [girondins] seemed inevitable, Danton already heard, so to speak, his death sentence in theirs. All the strength of this triumphant athlete of democracy succumbed under the feeling of the crimes of democracy and its disorders. He could only talk about the countryside, he was suffocating, he needed to escape from men in order to be able to breathe.

Danton’s absence did not go unnoticed. In a letter from Toulon written October 18, Fréron tells Lucile that ”I have been really worried about Danton. The public papers announce that he is ill. Let me know if he has recovered. Give him 1000 friendships from my part.” Through the next letter Fréron writes Lucile, dated December 11, we learn that Danton had a nickname within this inner circle of friends — ”I would like to have news of Patagon (Brune), Saturne (Duplain) and Marius (Danton).” It can be observed that Camille, as seen above, had likened Danton to Marius in Révolutions de France et de Brabant already in 1790.

Danton was however back in Paris again on November 22, when he is recorded to have spoken of ”the relief to be granted to abdicated priests” at the Convention. Two weeks later, December 5, he was accused of ”moderatism” by Coupé d’Oise for having opposed the suggestion of sending a group with a portable guillotine to Seine-Inférieure in order to deal with rebels fleeing the Vendée. Robespierre did however rise to defend Danton, saying that he had always seen him serve his homeland with zeal and ending by asking that everyone says what he sincerely thinks about Danton. Aside from Merlin de Thionville, who hailed Danton as the saviour of the republic, no one said anything, and Momoro therefore concluded this meant no one had anything to accuse Danton of. The discussion therefore ended with Danton embracing the president of the club amidst loud applause. Just two days later, the first number of Camille’s new journal, the Vieux Cordelier, was released. In the number, Desmoulins designates the session at the Jacobins on the 5th as the event that caused him to return to the journalistic pen: 

Victory is with us because, amid the ruins of so many colossal civic reputations, Robespierre’s in unassailed; because he lent a hand to his competitor in patriotism, our perpetual President of the “Old Cordeliers,” our Horatius Cocles, who alone held the bridge against Lafayette and his four thousand Parisians besieging Marat, who now seemed overwhelmed by the foreign party. Already having gained stronger ground during the illness and absence of Danton, this party, domineering insolent in society, in the midst of the most sensitive places, the most compelling justification, in the tribunes, jeering, and in the middle of the meeting, shaking its head and smiling with pity, as in the speech of a man condemned by every vote. We have won, however, because after the crushing speeches of Robespierre, in which it seems that talent grows in pace with the dangers of the Republic, and the profound impression he has left in souls, it was impossible to venture to raise a voice against Danton without giving, so to speak, a public quittance of guineas of Pitt. […] I learned some things yesterday. I saw how many enemies we have. Their multitude tears me from the Hotel des Invalides and returns me to combat. I must write. 

If Danton had a bigger role in the Vieux Cordelier than simply being part of the event that caused Camille to start writing it is debated. When Robespierre a little more than three months later was working out the dantonists’ indictment, he claimed that Danton had been the ”president” of the Vieux Cordelier, whose prints he had corrected and made changes to, and that Camille had been his and Fabre’s ”dupe.” In Memoirs of the revolution; or, an apology for my conduct… (1795) Garat claimed that Danton during his stay in Arcis-sur-Aube had been cooking up a ”conspiracy” with a goal to ”restore for the benefit of all the reign of justice and of the laws, and to extend clemency to his enemies,” and to which ”all of his friends,” including Desmoulins, entered into. In Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs… (1797) Prudhomme claimed that Danton, Lacroix, Camille-Desmoulins and Fabre-d'Églantine made up a secret party wishing to overthrow the Committee of Public Safety, and that Camille, as part of this plan, got charged with a ”moral attack,” leading to the creation of the Vieux Cordelier. Danton’s friend Edme-Bonaventure Courtois wrote in Notes et souvenirs de Courtois de l’Aube, député à la Convention nationale (cited in La Révolution française: revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1887), that ”it was in these painful moments that [Desmoulins] put to paper (in his Vieux Cordelier) the reflections that his indignation could no longer contain, and whose acrimony Danton, through his advice, softened in many places.” Finally, in  his Camille Desmoulins And His Wife: Passages From The History Of The Dantonists (1876), Jules Claretie included the following passage:

I know, through information given to me by M. Labat the elder, that one evening in that mournful summer of 1793, Danton and Camille Desmoulins had walked to the Cour du Commerce, along the Seine, by the quay des Lunettes, and, thinking of that 31st of May, which was to end in the events of the 31st of October, Danton pointed out to Camille the great river in which the rays of the sun, setting behind the hill of Passy, were reflected so vividly that the river looked like blood. ”Look,” said Danton — and, like Garat, Camille saw the tribune's eyes fill with tears — ”see, how much blood! The Seine runs blood! Ah! too much blood has been spilt! Come, pick up your pen again; write and demand clemency, I will support you!”

However, considering Robespierre’s notes had an interest in wanting to paint the ”dantonists” as a unified grupp (and perhaps also to absolve Desmoulins of some responsibility), while all the other testimonies were reported after the fact, its hard to be sure of anything. 

Danton went unmentioned in the rest of number 1, as well as number 2 (released December 10) of the Vieux Cordelier. When Camille on December 14 passed through the Jacobins ongoing scrutiny test, he regrettingly admitted that ”a well marked fatality willed that, among the sixty [sic] people who signed my wedding contract, I only have two friends left — Danton and Robespierre. All the others have emigrated or been guillotined.” In the Vieux Cordelier’s third number (released December 18), he wrote the following about Danton, apropos of underlining he was not asking for moderation:

In this duel between liberty and servitude, and in the cruel alternative of a defeat a thousand times more bloody than our victory, overruling the revolution therefore had less danger and was even better than remaining behind it, as Danton said, and it is necessary, above all, for the republic to secure the battlefield. […] Despite so many guineas (guinées) said Danton, name for me a single man strongly pronounced in the revolution, and in favor of the republic, who has been condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal?

Danton went unmentioned again in number 4 (December 21), but in number 5 Camille brings him up seven times, writing that ”I said with Danton, that to outrage the revolution was less dangerous and even better than to remain within it; that, on the course taken by the vessel, it was better to approach the rock of exaggeration, than the sandbar of moderation,” insisting he has never ceased to ”conspire against the tyrants with Danton and Robespierre,” denouncing Hébert for having attacked him, Danton and nine other deputies and claiming to have heard Danton say that ”[Hébert’s] pipe resembles the trumpet of Jericho, when he has smoked three times around a reputation, it must fall of itself.” At one point he also accuses Barère of having discussed the arrest of Danton on June 2.

On January 7, Camille and Robespierre got into a fight at the Jacobin club after the latter had denounced the fifth number of Vieux Cordelier as counter-revolutionary, but insisting that its author had been ”led astray by bad company,” and therefore proposing that the Society forgive him and ”just” burn the latest numbers of the Vieux Cordelier. When Camille refused that ultimatum, exclaiming that ”burning isn’t answering,” the fight worsened until Danton stepped in to act as meditator between the two:

Danton: Camille mustn’t be frightened by the rather severe lessons Robespierre’s friendship has just given him. Citizens, let justice and cold-headedness always preside over our decisions. In judging Camille, be careful to not strike a deadly blow against the liberty of the press.

In a letter to Fréron dated January 13, Lucile regretfully reports that ”Marius is not listened to anymore, he loses courage and vigour.” Around the same time, her father was arrested and locked up in the Carmes prison due to a few objects decorated with fleurs-de-lys having been found in his home. On January 24 Camille protested against his arrest at the Jacobins, gaining the support of Bourdon d’Oise who asked that the Committee of General Security make a report about the case in three days. Danton did however object to this, but did make the more vague suggestion that ”the Convention consider ways to do justice to all the victims of arbitrary measures and arrests, without harming the action of the revolutionary government”:

I oppose the kind of distinction of privilege which would seem to be granted to Desmoulins' father-in-law. I want the Convention to deal only with general affairs. If we want a report for this citizen, we also need one for all the others. […] My colleague's complaint is fair in itself, but it would give rise to a decree unworthy of us. If we were to give priority, it would belong to citizens who do not find in their fortune and in their acquaintance with members of the Convention hopes and resources in the midst of their misfortune: it must be to the unfortunate, to the needy, that you should first hold out your hands. I ask that the Convention consider ways to do justice to all the victims of arbitrary measures and arrests, without harming the action of the revolutionary government. I would be careful not to prescribe the means here. I request the referral of this question to the consideration of the Committee of General Safety, which will consult with the Committee of Public Safety; that a report be made to the Convention, and that it be followed by a broad and in-depth discussion; because all the discussions of the Convention have resulted in the triumph of reason and liberty.

When Robespierre about two months later was preparing the dantonists’ indictment, he wrote that ”during this last visit [to my place], [Danton] spoke of Desmoulins with contempt. He attributed his deviances to a vice that is private and shameful, but absolutely foreign to the crimes of the conspirators to the Revolution. Laignelot was witness.” Robespierre used this as evidence Danton had ”an ungrateful and dark soul,” as he previously had ”highly recommended the last productions of Desmoulins.”

Both Danton and Camille were arrested in the night between March 30 and March 31. They were taken to the Luxembourg prison and placed in solitary confinement. On April 1, in his very last written letter, Camille regrettingly tells Lucile: 

How to believe that a few jokes in my writings, against colleagues that had provoked me, have erased the memory of my services! I do not disguise the fact that I die as a victim of these jokes and my friendship with Danton. I thank my assassins for letting me die with him and Philippeaux. And since my colleagues have been cowardly enough to abandon us and listen to calumnies that I don’t know, but must be the most vulgar, I can say that we die as victims of our courage to denounce traitors, and of our love for the truth. We can well carry this testimony with us, that we die as the last republicans.

It would however appear Lucile wanted to do something about the situation. We have the following anecdote published in Histoire de la Révolution française (1850) by Nicolas Villiaumé, which, as far as I’m aware, is the only known connection we have between the Desmoulins couple and Danton’s second wife Louise-Sébastienne Gély (married June 14 1793):

[After the arrest of Danton and Desmoulins] Lucile ran to Madame Danton to suggest that she come with her to go find Robespierre, ask him for an explanation, and recall the feelings of friendship which had attached him to their husbands. Madame Danton refused, saying that she wanted nothing from a man who had showed himself to be the enemy of her husband. (I obtained this particularity from Madame Danton herself, who was then pregnant. She gave birth fifteen days after Danton's death, but her child did not live.)

On April 2, Danton, Desmoulins and seven other deputies were brought from the Luxembourg to the Conciergerie prison. If Mémoires d’un detenu pour servir à l’histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre(1795) by Honoré Riouffe are to be believed, the accused were kept in seperate cells here as well. He writes:

Danton, placed in a cell next to Westermann, didn’t stop talking, less to be heard by Westermann than by us. […] Here are some phrases I retained: […] ”What proves Robespierre is a Nero, is that he never spoke as kindly to Desmoulins as on the day before his arrest.”

Their trial began the very same day. For three days, the accused defended themselves (or at least tried to) against the charges of ”complicity with d'Orléans and Dumourier, with Fabre d'Eglantine and the enemies of the Republic, of having been involved in the conspiracy tending to re-establish the monarchy, to destroy the national representation and the republican government” side by side. It did however not go that well, and on April 5, Danton, Desmoulins and thirteen others were sentenced to death. The execution took place the very same afternoon. Contrary to the myth of Danton and Camille sitting next to each other in the same tumbril as they were driven to Place de la Révolution, number 561(April 6 1794) of Suite du Journal de Perlet reports that ”they were in three tumbrils: in the first was Danton, next to Delacroix; Fabre near the executioner; Hérault opposite Chabot. In the second, Phelippeaux [sic], Westermann, Camille Desmoulins, Basire and Launai d’Angers [sic]. […] Danton […]seemed to pay little attention to the crowd around him: he was chatting with Lacroix and Fabre. […]Desmoulins spoke almost continually to the people; the courage he affected seemed like a painful effort, he was an actor who was studying to play his last part well.”

After the death of Camille and, eight days later, Lucile, their son Horace was taken in by his maternal grandparents and aunt, who then permanently retired to their country house in Bourg-la-Reine. Danton’s sons Antoine and François-Georges were they too adopted by their maternal grandfather and uncles. In 1805, the two moved from Paris to Arcis-sur-Aube where they instead got looked after by their paternal grandmother. I have not been able to find anything indicating the families stayed in touch to process the grief or let the children come together, something which we on the other hand know Lucile’s mother did with Philippeaux’s widow.

[alonelycandleflame]

When I saw this review, I thought, "Oh wow. That sounds like a train wreck. But I'm bored and I want to see how horrible this book could possibly be." (Basically I completely ignored the "please skip this shit" part of the review) I am currently half way through, and this review is absolutely accurate. I found a page where Camille Desmoulins's name pops up. That surprised/bewildered me since no previous chapter/page ever mentioned Camille's name, so seeing his name pop up so suddenly was certainly a surprise. I am working my way through the book, and oh boy, this book is definitely going on my "Worst Books I've Ever Read" list.

JACOBIN FICTION CONVENTION MEETING 33: MADEMOISELLE REVOLUTION (2022)

1. The Introduction

Well, hello there, my dearest Citizens! Welcome back to Jacobin Fiction Convention! I missed you but, unfortunately, real life ™️ was a bit complicated yet again.

Either way, I’m back at it again, roasting analyzing historical fiction. Today’s “masterpiece” was graciously sent to me by @suburbanbeatnik in PDF form as a future review subject. And boy is it one hell of a ride.

Now, on paper, I was intrigued by a story of a Haitian biracial bisexual female protagonist, as there are many possibilities for that kind of story to unfold in a Frev setting.

Besides, it was written by an author who is promoting the #OwnVoices stories, which is a good intention in my opinion. Let’s see if the execution matches though.

(Spoiler alert: IT DOES NOT!)

Unfortunately, it looks like the book is only available in English at the moment and has to be purchased, mainly through Amazon. But maybe both of those things are for the best, since, upon finishing the book, I will be happy if it stays as contained and inaccessible to the wide audience as humanly possible.

Why? Well, more on that later.

This review will be longer than the ones I usually post, so please keep that in mind and grab some popcorn.

Also, it’s a very explicit book with scenes of sexual assault and gore. Goya’s “Disasters of War” and even “Innocent Rouge” levels of gore. So yeah, please be warned.

Anyway, this review is dedicated to @suburbanbeatnik , @jefflion , @lanterne , @on-holidays-by-mistake and @amypihcs . Love you, guys!

Now, let’s tear this sucker apart!!!

2. The Summary

The book follows the story of Sylvie de Rosiers, an aristocratic young woman born to a slave but raised by her plantation owner father as a free member of local nobility. Although not enslaved, Sylvie never felt truly accepted by the elites of Sainte Domingue.

However, following the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, Sylvie and one of her half-brothers manage to escape to France, where another revolution is unfolding.

Intrigued by the ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, Sylvie must fight to find acceptance in this new context and carve out a place for herself.

Sounds interesting so far, right? Let’s see if the story lives up to expectations or not.

3. The Story

I have to admit that the first few chapters, the ones taking place on Haiti, were actually pretty good, or at least not bad. The pacing was good, the storyline building up to the uprising made sense and the introductions of the characters and the world building were fine.

Too bad that this lasted only for about four beginning chapters. The French chapters making up the bulk of the book were awful.

The characters suffer from assassination like they’re mafia snitches, the pacing turns into a speed run, the historical context isn’t explained well at all and the story rapidly stops making sense:

First Sylvie arrives and quickly meets Robespierre and the Duplay family, then becomes an ardent revolutionary, then flip flops between loving Eleonore Duplay and pining for Robespierre, then just so happens to meet Danton and Marat, then becomes a spy, then murders Marat… No, I’m not joking.

All of this is in the book with very little justification that makes sense. The worst part? The book isn’t stated as alternative history, so the author is very dishonest and presents everything in the book as actual history that is accurate to reality when it’s definitely not.

Oh, and flashbacks. The fucking flashbacks breaking immersion like a cat breaking a vase don’t help at all.

There’s also a ton of Thermidorian propaganda as well, so yeah… Fail.

4. The Original Characters

Let’s tackle the OCs first because the historical peeps deserve a separate category here.

First and foremost, I don’t like Sylvie as a character. She starts out as a vain spoiled brat growing up surrounded by privilege and luxury and openly looking down on slaves, especially on women.

Then she witnesses the execution of a rebel and very suddenly goes: “Fuck, slavery is awful!”, renounces her old ways, disowns her father and does a 180. It’s not written well though and is more like a teenage tantrum than character development.

Sylvie keeps flip flopping like this throughout the entire story too. Yay…

Oh, and she’s a Mary Sue. Everyone adores her except the villains, she’s able to charm her way through anything and obviously plays an important role in almost all of Frev! Robespierre even calls her The Mother of the Revolution at several points, even though she did nothing to earn that title.

She also pines for Robespierre for no reason at all, except for “he’s cool and charming I guess”, but in order to get closer to him, Sylvie Sue ™️ starts an intimate relationship with Eleonore Duplay.

So yeah, our protagonist manipulates another person (which is abuse) and plays Eleonore like a fiddle, but she also flip flops between only using Eleonore and actually loving her. Is Sylvie ever called out for that? Technically yes, but it gets resolved too quickly so it doesn’t count.

Also, Sylvie is INCREDIBLY selfish. She’s fine with manipulating Eleonore, fine with Charlotte Corday being executed for killing Marat (in the book Sylvie did it) and taking the blame… Again, everything revolves around Sylvie and she never gets called out on that either and never gets better.

She lacks consistent personality aside from those traits, however. She claims to want safety yet always takes the risky option and refuses to emigrate when it would help her obtain actual safety, for instance.

Gaspard, one of her half-brothers, is a much better character in my opinion, but still underdeveloped. But at least his journey from privileged fop to a revolutionary is less clunky. Too bad he dies with the Montagnards in the end.

Sylvie also has another half-brother, Edmond, who is cartoonishly evil and tries to murder Sylvie at one point.

Sylvie also has a standard issue evil stepmother who is eager to marry her off and thus get rid of her but at least has enough decency to not be actively malicious.

Her dad is loving, but painfully ignorant.

Sylvie’s aunt Euphemie de Rohmer is a good character, always looking out for Gaspard and Sylvie. She does emigrate to London during the reign of terror though.

Okay, now let’s discuss the historical figures.

5. The Historical Characters

I know that I usually don’t discuss accuracy, but an exception must be made here.

Maximilien Robespierre seems to undergo a typical “character arc” of “actual revolutionary turned ruthless dictator”. He is also one again coded as asexual and thus shown as not giving two shits about his lover, Eleonore Duplay. He tries to marry Sylvie for political reasons only later in the book and it’s all but stated that he condones all the violence going on and is called a hypocrite multiple times. Oh, and he also kisses Sylvie without her consent… Err… DID SIVAK CONFUSE HIM FOR DANTON?!!! Okay, one sec…

(Shows up with a bloody face) Okay, let’s continue…

Eleonore Duplay is a promising artist who is fiercely loyal to Robespierre but cheats on him with Sylvie and later turns out to be a member of a women’s secret society that is trying to curb the terror. She’s on board with murdering Marat and is also friends with Olympe de Gouges and Charlotte Corday. Wtf?!

(Checks that the antidepressants didn’t cause a hallucination)

Elisabeth Duplay falls in love with Gaspard and her marriage to Le Bas is portrayed as arranged by Robespierre to “reward” Le Bas for being a loyal Jacobin, but at least she is relatively happy in said marriage. Uhm, okay…

Olympe de Gouges and Charlotte Corday are portrayed as basically saints and also part of the secret society.

Corday in particular is willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of France and Sylvie is fine with that because, apparently, Corday has nothing to live for anyway but Sylvie does.

It’s not like in reality Corday actually had a family and Girondist friends or anything so yeah, TOTALLY OKAY to throw her under the bus amirite?!

Danton, luckily, is portrayed fairly accurately as a crass womanizing brute so at least that’s correct.

Marat is a stereotypical bloodthirsty monster who is supposed to be very smart yet acts like an idiot in the presence of our dear Sylvie Sue.

Charlotte Robespierre makes exactly one cameo and acts like a total ass to both Duplay sisters and to Sylvie (who she just met). Don’t get me wrong, Charlotte was at odds with the Duplay family but not all of them and certainly she wasn’t a bitch to every single fucking stranger.

Augustin Robespierre is merry, a gentleman, loyal to his ideas but also a part of that secret society and also supports the idea of offing Marat. Nice…

Surprisingly, Henriette Robespierre makes a cameo alongside Charlotte and also acts like an ass but at least less so than Charlotte. Except she shouldn’t even be in the book because the cameo happens in 1792, yet Henriette died in 1780. So it’s either a ghost or the author doesn’t care. I’m kind of inclined to believe the latter.

Where are Camille Desmoulins and Saint-Just, you may act? ABSENT, believe it or not! No, I’m not kidding! They’re nowhere to be seen for some reason!!! I have no idea why. They’re not even fucking mentioned!!!

Anyway, let’s move on before I lose my sanity.

6. The Setting

Again, the first chapters are much better than the rest. In the majority of the book the descriptions are not that great and the world building is laughably inaccurate, to the point that, if I were told that it’s a joke fanfic, I’d have believed it instantly!!!

7. The Writing

Thankfully, there’s no “First Person Present Tense” bullshit, but the writing is still full of problems. The aforementioned flashbacks are just one problem, but there are others.

For example, extremely clunky use of French. I’m the beginning of every chapter we get a date and the months are in French. This would’ve been fine but gets ridiculous in cases like “early avril 1793”. What’s wrong with writing “early APRIL”?!

Oh, and in another instance, the houses of families are called “Chez + Family name”, like Chez Rohmer and Chez Marat. It gets weird when the text has phrases like “went at Chez Marat”. Chez already means “at” in this context, so it’s extremely redundant and a damn eyesore. Wouldn’t it be better to say “Went to Marat’s apartment”? Apparently, not for Zoe Sivak!

Also, the author describes all the brutal and gory scenes of executions and torture at an alarming length and with a concerning amount of details, to the point that I got very uncomfortable despite not being squeamish most of the time.

8. The Conclusion

Phew, it’s finally over. As you may have guessed, I don’t recommend wasting your time and money on this pile of trash.

A 13-year old here on tumblr can write a better novel than whatever the fuck this author published.

It’s poorly researched with inaccuracies that even a quick Wikipedia search could fix, the protagonist is an awful Mary Sue, the historical characters get constantly fucked over… so yeah, please skip this shit.

Anyway, on that note, let’s conclude today’s meeting. I think I might need time to recover from reading this book…

Stay tuned for updates!

Love,

Citizen Green Pixel.

[nesiacha]

Reflections on the Comments of Maximilien Robespierre and Manon Roland on Condorcet

Nicolas Condorcet (1743-1794)

A long time ago, I found on the excellent site Les Amis de Robespierre what Madame Roland and Robespierre thought of Condorcet. Here is the link: Les Amis de Robespierre. I will translate the thoughts of the different protagonists from this article and give my personal opinion.

Robespierre's Opinion on Condorcet: Condorcet and Robespierre often attacked each other on the issue of war in 1792. Robespierre said about Condorcet’s articles that he knows "nothing worse and more treacherous." After the arrest of the Girondins, when Condorcet fled, Robespierre apparently said, "This coward Caritat, who, like his friend Brissot, fled national justice, and who no less deserved it," and "The coward Condorcet began to fear the responsibility for his liberty-destroying impostures." A few days after the last statement, Condorcet died, either by suicide, from understandable stress, or, some say, possibly murder (I personally doubt the third hypothesis, but I mention it nonetheless).

In his speech on May 7, 1794, when Robespierre spoke about religion and morality based on republican principles, he released new cutting remarks against Condorcet: "A timid conspirator, despised by all parties," and whose writings are described as "the treacherous jumble of his mercenary rhapsodies." Such violent and cutting words against Condorcet. Yet, on the insult of cowardice, someone else who was initially allied with Robespierre before becoming an enemy would join him in this term.

Manon Roland's Opinion on Condorcet: The woman who was called muse of the Gironde had harsh words for Condorcet in her memoirs. She described him as "weak of heart and health," and added, "A brief note on Condorcet, « whose spirit will always be on the level of the greatest truths, but whose character will never be above fear." She concluded about him, "Such men should be left to write and never employed."

My Reflections: I thought these were heavy words. Of course, Condorcet also said very harsh things, and it must be said that my boundless admiration for him when I was very young (especially since the activist he was for gender equality could only please the future feminist in me) was greatly tempered when I read his equally cutting speech about Robespierre. Speaking of Robespierre in this way: "He talks about God and Providence; he calls himself a friend of the poor and the weak; he gets followed by women and weak-minded people. He gravely receives their adoration and homage, disappears with danger, and is seen only when danger is past. Robespierre is a priest and will never be anything else," I need not say more about what irritated me when he spoke of women this way. Firstly, there were many politically active women who did not follow Robespierre or necessarily the ideals of Condorcet. Should we, for example, speak of Albertine Marat who declared to Alphonse Esquiros, "She then spoke to me about Robespierre with bitterness. 'There was nothing in common,' she added, 'between him and Marat. Had my brother lived, the heads of Danton and Camille Desmoulins would not have fallen.'" Even if I slightly disagree with this part that if Marat had survived, Danton's head would not have fallen (Danton being a very corrupt character and Marat starting to doubt him greatly, especially according to the excellent biography of Danton written by Frédériche Bluche), we are far from admiration for Robespierre from an important revolutionary activist like Marat's sister. And this is just one example among many. We can profoundly disagree with men and women for their political convictions, but what makes feminism and above all gender equality is not imposing a woman's way of life, whether it be thoughts or convictions. I will make a provocation by paraphrasing Voltaire to transpose what I mean: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Although personally being cowardly, I would not do it to the death, this exactly reflects what a feminist person should be. And clearly, Condorcet did not respect this part, which makes his conception of gender equality totally imperfect (to put it mildly) by lumping many women together with Robespierre's speech and mocking their political convictions. I feel with him that as long as these women were in agreement with him, it was acceptable, but as soon as they had different political convictions, he cataloged and despised them.

However, do I agree with what Manon Roland and Robespierre said about him? Is everything to be discarded from Condorcet?

Regarding Robespierre, let's not forget that he was an adversary of Condorcet, so it should be taken with a LOT of caution. And let’s not forget that when Robespierre made his speeches, he himself committed acts that can be easily criticized.

Regarding Manon Roland, let’s not forget that Condorcet had positions that were quite difficult to situate within the Girondins and Montagnards split. The group we will call the Girondins did not like to be called that way, and there were more political dissensions between them, and Condorcet did not share all the positions of the Brissotins. So, her words should also be taken with some caution, and she too has things to be blamed for.

But let’s think, would a coward have moderated his criticisms on the moderation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitution of 1791? Because he publicly showed strong criticism.

He was a fervent opponent of the death penalty and stuck to his principles to the end. While some Girondins tried to spare Louis XVI not out of abolitionist conviction or royalism – most were republicans, including some before their time, like Manon Roland – but to not further legitimize the day of August 10, 1792, Condorcet voted against the death penalty out of conviction, whereas Robespierre, who had been an opponent of the death penalty, voted for the death of Louis XVI, rejecting the reprieve. However, he also felt that Louis XVI’s high treason deserved an exemplary punishment, being one of the few to demand that he be condemned to the galleys. He also advocated very early for the rights of Black people. Furthermore, what hastened Condorcet’s end was his condemnation of the arrest of the Brissotins – although his end was accelerated by the fact that he fled, which led to his death sentence in the summer of 1793. To my eyes, a coward would not have condemned the arrest of the Brissotins publicly. He would not have voted in contradiction to his own camp for his convictions (on this point, there is a certain parallel to be made with Robespierre facing the Constituent Assembly of 1789-1791, as Robespierre often intervened against a large majority to make his political ideas and those of so many others triumph).

Of course, I find it unfortunate that in popular culture, Condorcet is often forgiven for his mistakes because he also made mistakes that endangered the French Revolution, particularly the question of war, or what he said about women when he attacked Robespierre. His Panthéonization, for me, is deserved given that he, along with others, advocated generous ideas, and in his biography by historian Antoine Resche, “a public instruction project which, if it was not taken into account under the Revolution, laid the foundations of the school as it has been conceived since the Third Republic, that is, necessarily widespread education, by degrees,” but it is unfortunate that popular culture forget, especially Louis Michel Le Peletier, who proposed a mixed, free, and compulsory primary project defended by Robespierre. When speaking of revolutionaries defending the rights of female citizens, Condorcet is highlighted but not Charles Gilbert Romme, Guyomar, Charlier, and many others. Even more so, we forget revolutionary women like Théroigne de Méricourt, Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe, Simone Evrard, Albertine Marat, Marie-Anne Babeuf, and many others, as the list is long.

In conclusion, what do I think of Condorcet now that you know that my admiration for him as a teenager has long been greatly tempered and that he is not among my favorite revolutionaries? Well, I still have a fondness for him, a recognition, and a admiration for him like for other revolutionaries, including Manon Roland and Robespierre, although they are not in my top 20 either and not my favorites characters of the frev. They were, fundamentally, complex people caught in a complex period who made, of course , grave and even unforgivable mistakes, but as was said on Tumblr, faultless revolutionaries are quite rare ( (even if there are people in my eyes who are indefensible or rotten like Fouché, Carrier, Tallien, Barras, Charles X, etc.) especially during these during this hellish period of civil war, external and former leaders like Louis XVI who betrayed his people or émigrés who were ready to do anything to destroy the necessary gains of the revolution. . And they are still considered today in a period that is a victim of a black legend that must be constantly combated .

P.S : Forgive me is there was an article Tumblr about what said Manon Roland and Robespierre about Condorcet I checked but I might have missed it

[georgesdamnton]

Desmoulins: Uh, Max, it says here, “Dogs Without Leashes Will Be Fined 100 livres”...

Robespierre: *crying* They don't have that kind of money?!?!!??