Man is free at the moment he wishes to be

Using poor Robespierre to get my point across: I love answering questions! It helps me focus my thoughts, and honestly, it’s just fun.

To publish the Works of Robespierre is to rehabilitate a name around which so many unjust prejudices have gathered; it is, at the same time, to provide the people with an abundant source of enlightenment and instruction. How many men who have never so much as glanced at Robespierre’s writings or speeches are convinced, on the authority of the aristocracy’s paid writers, that Robespierre was a villain. Let them read his works, and they will arrive at a fairer judgement of his feelings and his heart.

Robespierre’s works are the best answer to the frenzied declamations of his equally frenzied detractors. To slander, insult and shriek is not to reason. Those who, for want of better arguments, heap insult upon slander against a man prove one thing: that there is not a single fact in that man’s life which might support a reasonable and conscientious attack upon him.

Did Robespierre err? That is what I shall examine in the historical notice with which I shall preface his works. But it is above all through those works themselves, by reading and reflecting upon them, that one may become convinced that Robespierre was cruelly slandered. It is by closely examining his conduct and his political actions from 1789 until 9 Thermidor that one will recognise in him the purest defender of the rights of humanity.

Whoever reads Robespierre is inwardly consumed by a more ardent love of country and liberty, and by a deeper hatred of the tyrants who crush humankind. Whoever reads him sees a new universe unfolding before his eyes. He feels, touches and understands his rights; he identifies himself with them; he becomes worthy of the noble name of man, worthy of the great title of citizen.

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything I usually post on this blog , but today I’ve had my Disney princess moment and I really wanted to share it 😅

And then my advances were rejected by a bear with a salmon

This weekend my oldest gremlin had a birthday party because she is now almost six and has friends and a social life far more active than mine. The youngest gremlin was left at home to sulk without her older sister because, at three, she does not yet have a social life. So I loaded the youngest gremlin into the car and went somewhere she could find an enriching activity that lets me feel reasonably competent as a mother, without making me want to repeatedly bang my head against the nearest available surface because it is too loud and smells wrong: a museum.

Namely, La Boverie in Liège, for its tenth anniversary exhibition.

I had wanted to see the exhibition for a while because, instead of merely lining up famous paintings, it also looks at what makes a museum work: conservation, restoration, scientific imaging, loans, storage, exhibition design, the whole quiet bureaucracy of museum life.

And there, in the middle of this very modern lesson in museum work, while the small gremlin was pointing at a still life and screaming “bunny”, stood this fine gentleman: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Napoléon Bonaparte, Premier Consul, painted in 1804.

Napoleon in Liège

It is a big thing, almost absurdly so, and therefore entirely Napoleonic. Bonaparte is shown full-length, life-size, wrapped in very fetching red, one hand tucked into his waistcoat, the other resting on the document promising the reconstruction of Amercœur, the Liège suburb devastated during the wars of the 1790s. Behind him, through a window, appears the cathedral of Saint-Lambert, although by 1804 the cathedral was no longer standing. It had been destroyed after Liège’s Happy Revolution.

In August 1789, almost in step with Paris, the city rose against its prince-bishop, César-Constantin de Hoensbroeck, in what local memory rather optimistically called the Heureuse Révolution, the Happy Revolution. It was “happy” in the eighteenth-century sense, meaning fortunate or auspicious, not in the sense that people were having an unreasonable amount of fun rebelling. The movement forced the prince-bishop to flee, briefly opened the way to republican and constitutional experiments, and was crushed by imperial intervention in 1791. Yet the old ecclesiastical principality never quite recovered and kept changing hands between the Austrians and the French, depending on who was winning the French Revolutionary War at the time. The cathedral of Saint-Lambert had begun to be destroyed in 1794, when the city was in French hands.

Liège had been absorbed into revolutionary France in 1795 as part of the département de l’Ourthe. Bonaparte visited the city in August 1803, and the reconstruction of Amercœur became a useful scene of governmental benevolence. The suburb had been destroyed by Austrian troops during their retreat in 1794, and Napoleon’s 1803 decree made 300,000 francs available for reconstruction. The words on the paper in Ingres’s painting, Faubourg d’Amercœur rebâti, refer directly to that decree.

Bonaparte does not appear as the young general of Arcole, hair flying, sword drawn, soldiers following behind him with suicidal enthusiasm. He appears as a statesman. A lawgiver. A man who signs decrees, repairs suburbs, and reconciles churches. The sword is still there, of course. The sword is always there. But it is not the star of the performance. The document is.

Which makes sense. This painting was a gift in 1805 from Bonaparte himself to the city of Liège. It was a work for the citizens of Liège, for their eyes. The message was for them.

The cathedral in the background is even more eloquent. Saint-Lambert appears whole, but conveniently as a background piece. This is a symbolic nod to the Concordat of 1801, the agreement between Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII which restored public Catholic worship in France while keeping the Church firmly under state supervision. The Catholic religion was recognised as that of the great majority of French citizens, but the settlement gave the state enormous leverage over bishops, salaries, and ecclesiastical administration.

The message of the painting is clear. It does not say, “I have conquered Liège.” That would be vulgar. It says, “I have repaired Liège.” It does not say, “The Church submits.” That would be crude. It shows the cathedral framed by curtains, subordinated by scale, and made decorative. It does not say, “I am becoming a monarch.” It places Bonaparte in a red costume, beside a throne-like chair, with an ornamental sword, and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions.

Ingres was only twenty-three when he painted this. He had trained within the academic tradition and under the long shadow of Jacques-Louis David. Bonaparte did not sit for Ingres. The young painter relied on an earlier 1802 portrait by Antoine-Jean Gros. Gros’s Bonaparte, First Consul had already presented the general transformed into chief of state. Ingres takes some of those elements and reuses them in his own version, but gives Bonaparte a more stately, less lively look. To me, Ingres’s Bonaparte looks like he could use a few cups of coffee.

The scientific display beside the painting is one of the best parts of the exhibition. Infrared reflectography reveals the underdrawing, the decisions, the hesitations, and the second thoughts of the artist. Bonaparte was moved closer to the centre of the composition; the costume, especially the collar, was adjusted; the carpet once had star motifs; the window originally had no curtain.

As someone who dabbles in painting, I actually enjoyed reading the pigment analysis. The exhibition lists lead white, Naples yellow, chrome yellow, carbon black, Prussian blue, vermilion, and earth pigments based on iron and manganese oxides. It is a very rich palette that skews rather warm, which I presume was a conscious choice to make Bonaparte appear more approachable.

Personally, I am not a big fan of his expression. To me he looks a bit dead, and I think Ingres’s later paintings, including the one of Napoleon on his imperial throne, do a better job of conveying emotion in the face. But the details of the waistcoat, the room, and the background are gorgeous. I spent a good five minutes admiring the waistcoat and the throne before the little gremlin screamed “mama bunny” to show me another painting with a dead bunny (the joys of parenting...).

The painting now belongs to La Boverie’s collection and has been classified as a Trésor of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles since 2012. I think it is part of the regular collection, so it is worth a visit. Plus, the rest of the collection is quite good as well and very diverse: local artists, some Picasso, some Gauguin, some nice Impressionist work.

The new June issue of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1)  is out, and it has one of the best articles I have read in a while: a study of the history and political use of the terms Robespierreism and Robespierreist, from the French Revolution to today.

Even better, it is a regards croisés (2) round table, not a standard essay. Several people give their views on what “Robespierreist” means.

Is this an art blog? Not really.

Do I have 19,990 unfinished drafts on various interesting topics (imo)? Naturally.

Is there an unfinished Bonchamps in the room judging me? Of course there is.

Did I spend 50 minutes sketching what I choose to believe is Lucille in charcoal because I randomly found an old charcoal set? Of course I did.

Still a work in progress, but it is moving.

Anyway, since I started experimenting with paint earlier this year, I have had to get used to the idea that art has an “ugly phase”, and that the ugly phase can last for a while.

This is the ugly phase of my Bonchamps.

This portrait is basically a study, in my own style, of La Mort de Bonchamps by Thomas Degeorge, 1837. The original is a gigantic painting, which I had the opportunity to see at the Historial de Vendée two years ago. It is very impressive, and the photo really does not do it justice.

In the painting, the dying Bonchamps, surrounded by his most faithful soldiers, gives his second, Charles d’Autichamp, the order that will make him famous. He orders that the 5,000 republican soldiers who were to be executed before the defeated Vendéens crossed the Loire be spared. He tells d’Autichamp that this is the last order he will give, and that he would like it to be obeyed. They obey it.

I do have an issue with it. Not with its artistic merit. It is very much of its period, and the Bonchamps here is clearly inspired by the classical figure on the tomb by David d’Angers. My issue is simpler: Degeorge’s Bonchamps is too pretty. Too composed. Too noble.

Death is not pretty. And I feel making him look so graceful takes something away from the gesture itself.

At Cholet, on 17 October 1793, Bonchamps was shot in the abdomen. It was a fatal wound. It also meant a long, agonising death, lasting more or less a day. There were very few options for pain relief. Very little that could be done. (1)

The man was in agony. And in his agony, he ordered 5,000 prisoners spared.

The Bonchamps of the original painting looks a little too composed for my taste. Mine is still unfinished, but one of the things I want to work on is making his face look more like that of a dying man, without making it grotesque.

And the best part about painting (and, frankly, the useful lesson for someone who likes planning and has perfectionist habits) is that I have no idea how this is going to end up looking. I hope it will looks good.

Notes

I meant to show off that I’ve framed Robespierre and put him on my office wall, but my dog has commandeered the armchair, and I’m not about to move my fluffy tyrant.

Hi, thank you so much for the question!

Unfortunately, as with Camille’s execution, Robespierre left no record of his feelings. All we can do is speculate from his actions, and even then with caution, given that there were several overlapping factors that may have influenced him during that period, beyond Lucile’s execution alone.

What we do know for certain is that Robespierre was one of the eight committee members who signed Lucile’s arrest warrant on the eve of Camille’s execution. She was executed on 13 April 1794. At that point, Robespierre and the whole Committee of Public Safety were still dealing with the aftermath of the prison plot.

When Lucile’s trial began, her mother, Mme Duplessis, wrote to Robespierre in despair and begged him to save her daughter. She clearly seems to have thought he might be able, and willing, to intervene in the affair. Her letter, as quoted by Hervé Leuwers, reads:

"O Robespierre, if there is still time, save the most innocent of creatures, save the unfortunate wife of Camille from death! It is a mother in despair who appeals to you. My daughter is on the verge of succumbing under the weight of the most infamous of slanders. Today she is to be judged. Tell the judges to suspend their verdict, tell them to spare innocence, candour, and every virtue combined. […] You are the only person in the world to whom I can turn with confidence, because I know the greatness of your soul and because I am ready to succumb under the weight of misfortune."

Whether he received the letter or not, as far as I know, he made no attempt to save her. Why …is quite honestly, anyone’s guess. 

For one thing, there is a case to be made that Robespierre did save people implicated in the same plot. Albert Mathiez speculates that, while he allowed the executions of Lucile Desmoulins and others to proceed, he actively tried to save the former constituent Jacques Guillaume Thouret, who had also been implicated in the prison conspiracy. The main basis for this is that Robespierre’s signature was the only one missing from Thouret’s arrest warrant. Robespierre also shielded Madame Philippeaux from being drawn into her husband’s trial.

Hervé Leuwers has, in my opinion, a reasonable position when he suggests that Robespierre had been able to shield Mme Philippeaux because she had not yet come under suspicion. Lucile, by contrast, was already before the tribunal, and he had played a role in her arrest and in the accusatory report against her husband.

Take that as you wish. In my opinion, his actions can be interpreted in several different ways. 

After the fatal verdict that sent Lucile to the guillotine, Madame Duplessis was so distraught that she allegedly wrote an unsent letter to Robespierre, calling him a tiger with a human face and accusing him of murdering both Camille and his wife. 

In the aftermath of the trial and executions, his health seems to have deteriorated sharply. He continued to appear in public until 19 April, then withdrew completely and remained absent until 7 May. How much Lucile’s execution contributed to this mental strain is anyone’s guess.

Sorry that I cannot give a more conclusive answer, but the best I can say is that we do not really know.

Sources:

If you’re new to this corner of the internet, and what you’ve mainly seen is the sensationalist side of French Revolution history, you probably picture Paris as a continuous procession of carts rolling toward the guillotine. And, by the same logic, you’re probably imagining the Revolutionary Tribunal as a kind of legalised abattoir: a place where everyone arrived as a suspect and left with their head in a basket.

Unfortunately, despite what some books, films, and even documentaries would have you think, the Tribunal was, for quite a long time, a fairly dull bureaucratic institution where you had a respectable chance of being told to go home.

And today, because I like numbers, I’m not going to spend much time getting lyrical about the intricacies of the Tribunal or its most important cases. I’m just going to show you the statistics of the cases it handled.

The Start in March

The Tribunal was created on 10 March 1793 while the Republic was pretty much a mess. France was fighting most of Europe and losing at its borders, and people at home were getting restless.

The idea was pushed by Georges Danton (1), who famously argued that the state needed to be terrible so the Parisian mobs would not have to be. In other words, he wanted a formal court to deal with traitors before the public decided to deal with them itself, with pitchforks, as it had during the September Massacres (2).

In its first year, the Tribunal was very... judicial.

In fact, in 1793, most people brought before the Tribunal were acquitted. The Tribunal handled its highest volume of cases in July 1793, with a total of 66. That same month also saw the highest number of acquittals: 47. Death sentences reached their high point in September 1793 at 17. Seventeen for the whole month. Not exactly an abattoir, is it?

The Great Centralisation

By the spring of 1794, the revolutionary government decided to shut down most of the special provincial courts. Revolutionary justice would now be dispensed, strictly, in Paris. Decrees passed in April and May ordered that suspects from across the Republic be sent directly to the capital.

This created a serious bottleneck.

But to secure convictions in high-profile political show trials, the government had already started stripping away legal protections in a fairly methodical way. During the trial of the Girondins (3) in October 1793, the Convention decreed that juries could simply stop deliberating after three days if their consciences had been sufficiently enlightened. When Danton used his oratorical skill to dominate his own trial (4), the Convention passed another decree allowing the court to silence and remove defendants who resisted or insulted the justice of the nation.

In other words, the protections given to suspects were already being worn away before what is so often presented as “the law of the Great Terror,” and as the final proof that Robespierre wanted to become a dictator and purge his enemies: the Law of 22 Prairial.

The Law of Prairial

First, let me state my bias plainly: I am not especially fond of the Law of Prairial. I think parts of it should have been thought through a good deal better (for example, the whole acquit-or-die arrangement... the military-court atmosphere... I understand why those things are there, but on moral grounds, I am not a fan). That said, I also do not really see it as some uniquely bloodthirsty innovation. If anything, it looks more like a continuation of what had already been happening for several months.

The law redefined several basic parts of the judicial process. It officially removed the old category of “suspects,” replacing it with a new one: “enemies of the people.” However, this new definition remained extremely broad, covering anyone accused of trying to destroy public liberty, deceive the people, protect traitors, spread defeatism, or obstruct food supplies.

To speed trials up, the law removed the right to defence counsel and allowed juries to convict on the basis of moral, verbal, or written proof, using their own common sense, sometimes without even hearing witnesses. Judges and juries were also limited to just two possible outcomes: full acquittal or death, with no possibility of appeal.

Now, if you are looking at your screen or phone and thinking, well, whoever wrote this must have been insane, bloodthirsty, or angling for dictatorship, allow me a moment.

I will not go into too much detail here, because I think the law deserves an article of its own, but in brief, Couthon (5) (because it was Couthon who wrote it) and Robespierre did not simply wake up one morning and say: “muahhahahahah, we shall now dismantle a fair justice system so we can kill whoever we want”.

The law was not written in a vacuum. It was not some legal novelty appearing from nowhere. In fact, for the deputies of the Convention, the actual substance of the Law of Prairial was not necessarily a shocking innovation, because it directly repeated provisions from the decree of 23 Ventôse. The Ventôse decrees (6) had already begun the process of centralising revolutionary justice by suppressing existing tribunals and setting up six central commissions to judge the enemies of the Revolution under the tight supervision of the government committees.

The Law of Prairial effectively completed that process, bringing an end to the administrative confusion of earlier laws and to the incoherence of having several overlapping courts.

In fact, the only “innovation” that scandalised members of the Convention was the provision allowing deputies to be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal without prior parliamentary approval. That was the real panic. (7)

Given that Paris was now responsible for all the cases coming before the Revolutionary Tribunal, both the workload and the number of death sentences went up. In six weeks, the court handed down 1,376 death sentences. Prosecutors used prison informers to draft indictments grouping together multiple suspects who were often entirely unrelated. During the month of Messidor, 796 death sentences were pronounced.

That is a sharp increase. That is a great many deaths. That is something that needs to be put in context.

France had, at the time, 28 million people and was at war.

The Numbers in Context

After Robespierre’s death and the Thermidorian Reaction, the Revolutionary Tribunal survived for less than a year, until May 1795. In that span, between 1793 and 1795, the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal pronounced exactly 2,639 death sentences, while acquitting almost as many people: 2,357 individuals.

Again, more than 2,500 people is not a trivial number. But in a country of 28 million, in a national state of emergency, it is not exactly abattoir-level either.

In fact, when you look at the broader picture of the Terror across France as a whole, the total number of official death sentences handed down by all revolutionary courts and commissions was 16,594. Which means the Paris Tribunal accounted for only 16% of the official executions, while the vast majority, 84%, or 13,955 death sentences, took place in the provinces, especially in regions in the midst of civil war, like the Vendée (8).

If you widen the statistics to include incidental victims, such as those who died of disease in overcrowded prisons (usually estimated at between 10,000 and 12,000), and those summarily executed without any formal trial at all (another 10,000 to 12,000), the overall death toll of the Terror rises to somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people.

To put the Tribunal’s numbers in perspective, the 2,639 death sentences handed down in Paris over the course of the Terror is actually fewer than the 2,700 individuals condemned by French military courts during the First World War. Likewise, the total 16,594 official executions across all of France during the entire Reign of Terror is roughly equivalent to the 15,000 to 17,000 Communards executed in Paris in a single week in May 1871 (9)

Notes

(1) Georges Danton (1759–1794) was a major French revolutionary politician and orator, especially prominent in 1792–93. He was later tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed in April 1794.

(2) The September Massacres were the killings of prisoners in Paris between 2 and 6 September 1792. They were carried out by crowds who feared invasion, counter-revolution, and plots inside the prisons.

(3) The Girondins were a loose group of republican deputies associated with provincial interests, economic liberalism, and distrust of Parisian radicalism. Their trial in October 1793 ended with the execution of leading members after a strongly political prosecution.

(4) Danton’s trial took place in late March and early April 1794 and ended with his execution on 5 April. It happened in the context of the Indulgents, who were the more moderate revolutionary faction associated with a wish to ease the measures of the revolutionary government.

(5) Georges Couthon (1755–1794) was a deputy, member of the Committee of Public Safety, and close ally of Robespierre.

(6) The Ventôse decrees were laws passed in February and March 1794, mainly associated with Saint-Just, providing for the confiscation of property from those classed as enemies of the Revolution and its redistribution to needy patriots.

(7) Tellingly, the very first piece of the law to be repealed immediately after Robespierre’s execution was the article allowing deputies to be arrested without a prior Assembly hearing. Self-preservation, it turns out, is a powerful legislative motivator.

(8) The Vendée War was a civil war in western France from 1793, fought between the revolutionary government and a largely Catholic and royalist insurgency. It was the bloodiest conflict of the Revolution. I talk a lot about it on this blog, so check out the "vendee war" tag if interested.

(9) In May 1871, Paris was in the final phase of the Paris Commune, an insurrection against the government based at Versailles. The month ended with the Bloody Week, when government troops retook the city and killed large numbers of Communards.

Sources Greer, Donald. The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935

First of all, thank you so much for the question, and sorry it took me forever to answer. Since this past week marked the trial and execution of the Indulgents, it felt like the right moment to do it.

As usual, I’m going to give a bit of context for anyone who is not very familiar with Desmoulins and Robespierre, so feel free to skip straight to the fourth section if you just want the actual answer. Yes, I know, I’m unbearably long-winded as usual. :-)

How close were Camille and Robespierre?

Before we look at the messy, tragic business of April 1794, it is worth establishing just how close these two men actually were.

They started out as scholarship boys at the prestigious Louis-le-Grand college in Paris. Robespierre was a couple of years older, but they became fast friends.(1) By the early years of the Revolution, they were fighting alongside one another. They were so politically aligned that in March 1791, Camille proudly declared in print that he and Robespierre were the “Jacobins of the Jacobins.” Camille frequently used his journal to praise his “dear college comrade,” famously calling him one of the “two Catos (2) of the Legislature.” He worshipped the man, praising his absolute incorruptibility and describing his speeches as “sublime.”

Their bond was not just political. When Camille married Lucile Duplessis on 29 December 1790, Robespierre was one of the official witnesses. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to tease Camille for getting too wrapped up in married life and neglecting politics:  Robespierre informed "Monsieur Camille" that Lucile's beautiful eyes were no excuse for ignoring his work on the national guards. That is not the tone of a distant acquaintance. He even bounced their infant son, Horace, on his knee.(3)

Robespierre also sometimes gave Camille feedback on his work before it went to print. Before the publication of the highly influential Histoire des Brissotins (4), for instance, he read the proofs and urged him to remove certain passages attacking the Committee of Public Safety, warning him not to lose sight of the real target. Camille listened.

The Fracture

So how does a friendship like that unravel? Very publicly.

Things began to go wrong in the winter of 1793-1794. Alongside Georges Danton, Desmoulins launched a campaign for moderation and clemency through his new journal, Le Vieux Cordelier. At first, Robespierre approved. He even read and approved the proofs of the second issue, which attacked the “exaggerated” revolutionaries driving the de-Christianising movement. For a brief moment, Le Vieux Cordelier was widely seen as reflecting the line of both Danton and Robespierre.

Then Camille published the third issue.

There, drawing on Tacitus (5), he sketched a thinly veiled and deeply unsettling parallel between revolutionary France and the paranoid despotism of imperial Rome. Robespierre was clearly alarmed. But even then, he was not yet ready to abandon his friend.

As the backlash mounted in early January 1794, Robespierre tried to contain the damage. The Jacobins (6) summoned Camille to explain himself, and Robespierre stepped in to calm the room. He described Desmoulins as an enfant étourdi, a spoiled or heedless child, well intentioned but led astray by bad company.

It was a patronising defence, but it was still a defence. Robespierre offered the club a compromise: the offending issues of the journal should be burned, but Camille himself should remain among the Jacobins.

It was, politically speaking, a lifeline. And Camille, demonstrating a truly spectacular lack of survival instinct, refused it.

Proud and unwilling to retreat, he answered Robespierre with a line from Rousseau: “Burning is no answer!” (7) The rebuke landed badly. Robespierre, stung and angered, warned that if Camille were anyone else, such writings would not have been treated so lightly.

What is striking, though, is that even after this very public humiliation, Robespierre still did not entirely let him go. On 8 January, he tried to prevent the Jacobins from reading and discussing yet another controversial issue of the journal. And when the club voted on 10 January to expel Desmoulins, Robespierre intervened at the last moment and secured his reinstatement.

The Downfall of the Indulgents

The public dressing-down did nothing to stop Camille. He kept publishing.

He remained a leading voice among the Indulgents, the faction arguing that, now that the Republic was winning its wars, the worst of the crisis had passed (8). Danton wanted, quite simply, to enjoy the Republic. He thought the time had come to negotiate peace, which in turn meant making France appear a little less ferociously revolutionary. The Indulgents called for a general amnesty and the mass release of suspects.

Robespierre thought all this dangerously premature. He argued that it was frivolous to treat a few military victories as proof that the danger had passed. He feared, not without reason, that opening the prisons would unleash a violent counter-revolutionary reaction and tear the young Republic apart.

He was also thoroughly unimpressed by Danton’s vision of a more relaxed Republic. Robespierre accused the Indulgents of treating the people like a herd to be exploited for their own luxury.

But his loudest attacks were aimed mainly at Danton. So why was Camille executed?

Because Robespierre was not a dictator.

For all the mythology that grew up around him, Maximilien did not possess absolute power over life and death. He was only one member of a committee of twelve, and Camille, with his viciously sharp pen, had managed to alienate a great many of them. Men like Barère, Billaud-Varenne, and Collot d’Herbois had every reason to fear what he might write if left at liberty. Saint-Just despised him, which did not help.

Camille, or rather his writings, was also becoming dangerous to the Revolutionary Government, because they publicly undermined both its justification and its methods at a time when Robespierre still believed severe measures were essential to save the Republic.

All this led to an arrest and trial that was, to put it mildly, procedurally dubious.

Danton and Desmoulins were deliberately bundled into a show trial alongside foreigners and corrupt financiers. The government wanted to compromise the political defendants by association, leaning heavily on the idea of a vast “Foreign Plot” (9).

The difficulty was that the trial was public. Danton rose to the occasion and used his formidable gifts as an orator to batter the prosecution and win the sympathy of the galleries. He demanded that sixteen members of the Convention be called as witnesses. The court officials, alarmed by the possibility of an acquittal, turned to the Committee of Public Safety.

To stop Danton from swaying public opinion any further, a rumour was spread that a prison uprising was being prepared (10), and the Convention passed a decree allowing any prisoner who “resisted or insulted” national justice to be silenced.

The tribunal used that decree to exclude the defendants from the proceedings. They were stripped of the right to defend themselves. Then, with the accused removed, the judge and prosecutor further manipulated the jury by secretly showing them a mysterious forged letter at the last moment.

The death sentence was delivered on the fourth day. The Indulgents were sent to the guillotine that same afternoon, on 5 April 1794.

Did Desmoulins blame Robespierre? 

So how did Camille actually feel about his arrest and impending execution? After that long detour, we finally come to your question.

You might expect him to have felt utterly betrayed by his old friend. You might imagine him cursing Robespierre to hell. And yes, the sense of betrayal was clearly there. In an unsent letter to Lucile, written from prison, he seems shocked: “But Robespierre, who signed the order for my dungeon! But the republic, after all I have done for it! That is the price I receive for so many virtues and sacrifices!”

He did blame Robespierre for his imprisonment. But he did not blame Robespierre alone. In fact, he seems to have clung, even then, to the hope that his old college friend might still intervene and save him.

From his cell, he told Lucile that he was writing to Maximilien, adding: “no doubt he will answer you.” Lucile herself shared that hope, drafting her own appeal to Robespierre and reminding him of their long closeness.

When Camille drafted notes for his defence, he did not direct a single reproach at Robespierre. Instead, he reserved all his anger at the other men on the Committee (11). Politically, he seems to have tried to align himself, at least in part, with Robespierre. Whether that reflected genuine belief, or a last attempt not to estrange the only man he thought might still save him, we cannot know.

Camille was not blind to the reality of his situation. He seems to have understood that his fall was not simply the work of one man, but the result of a broader political purge, helped along by his own choices. In his final letter, he wrote that he was dying for two very specific things: his sharp, mocking pen, and his steadfast friendship with Danton. He denounced his “assassins” and the cowardice of his colleagues in the Convention, who had abandoned him and Danton to slander. Right to the end, he seems to have seen himself as a man destroyed for his courage.

Did Robespierre feel guilty? 

While Camille left behind a clear paper trail from prison that allows us to glimpse his state of mind, Robespierre did not. There are no personal diaries, and no private letters in which he set down what he felt about the condemnation of two of his oldest political companions. If we want to understand his reaction, we are therefore forced to look at what he did, not at what he may have felt.

On 5 April 1794, the day Danton and Desmoulins went to the guillotine, Robespierre presented a public face of complete firmness. Nineteenth-century writers loved to dramatise the moment, imagining him pale and shaken in his room at the Duplay house, deeply affected by the sound of the carts carrying the condemned to execution (12). It is, for sure, an evocative image, but as far as I know, there is no real evidence for it.

What we do know is that he went to the Jacobin Club that very evening. There, he spoke, urged the members to remain vigilant, and insisted that the Republic could not relax its severe measures. In public, at least, he showed no sign of grief.

That said, it is possible that the whole episode took a heavy physical toll on him. Robespierre had a long history of falling ill during moments of extreme political strain. His punishing workload and austere way of life already left him physically fragile, prone to exhaustion and nervous collapse (13).

After the trial and executions, his health seems to have deteriorated sharply. He continued to appear in public for about ten days, then suddenly disappeared. By 19 April, he had withdrawn completely and would remain absent until 7 May.

When he returned, just after his thirty-sixth birthday, several contemporaries thought him changed. Paul Barras, who saw him during this period, described a man so pale and unnaturally still that he compared his face to marble and to the dead. Barras is hardly a neutral witness, and his testimony should be treated with caution, but the basic fact remains: Robespierre was away for three weeks because he was, apparently, seriously unwell.

Was this because of Camille’s loss? There is no way to know for certain, and we can only speculate. My educated guess (so do not take it as absolute truth) is that the physical decline was most likely due to an accumulation of factors (14) but the loss of a close friend certainly did not help.

Notes

(1) In Twelve Who Ruled, R. R. Palmer goes so far as to describe their dynamic like this: “Maximilien looked on Camille, who was two years his junior, almost as on a younger brother who must be protected from his own caprices.” This strikes me as a bit exaggerated, but it is safe to say they were exceptionally good friends.

(2) Cato was Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger), a Roman statesman famous for his fierce moral integrity, stoicism, and unwavering defence of the Roman Republic against Julius Caesar.

(3) In 1794, when Camille was in prison, Lucile drafted a heartbreaking, unfinished letter to Robespierre begging for her husband's life. She reminded him of their intimacy, recalling how he had joined their hands in marriage and bounced their son on his knees.

(4) Histoire des Brissotins was a highly influential and fiercely satirical pamphlet published by Camille Desmoulins in mid-1793. It ruthlessly attacked the Girondin faction (often called Brissotins after their leader, Jacques-Pierre Brissot), successfully destroying their public reputation and paving the way for their political purge and eventual execution.

(5) Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian who chronicled the reigns of the Roman emperors, heavily focusing on the corruption, paranoia, and tyranny of absolute power. By using Tacitus, Camille was not-so-subtly implying that the Committee of Public Safety had become the very despots they claimed to be fighting.

(6) The Jacobin Club was the most famous and influential political club of the French Revolution.

(7) Robespierre famously was very into Rousseau, so quoting Rousseau at him was a “burn” in modern terms.

(8) It is worth noting their motives were not exactly pure. The Indulgent campaign was heavily motivated by corruption and self-preservation. They were actively seeking to protect political allies implicated in massive financial scandals, such as the liquidation of the India Company.

(9) The "foreign plot" refers to a persistent, paranoid conspiracy theory that alleged that various domestic factions were secretly funded by hostile foreign power, primarily William Pitt's Britain, to deliberately destabilise and destroy the Republic from within.

(10) The gist of the "prison plot" was that inmates across Paris, coordinated by people on the outside like Lucile Desmoulins, were stockpiling weapons and plotting to break out, slaughter the government committees, and overthrow the Republic. It ends up being the basis for Lucile's arrest and execution.

(11) He directed his fury entirely at men like Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Bertrand Barère, and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois.

(12) Nineteenth-century historians like Jules Michelet and Romain Rolland largely invented these vivid, psychological scenes to add dramatic flair to the narrative. The execution carts carrying Camille and the other condemned men did pass in front of the Duplay residence on the rue Saint-Honoré, which is where Robespierre lived. However, the dramatic scene where Danton and Desmoulins are shown in the same cart, shouting insults, threats, or pleas at a silent Robespierre hiding behind closed shutters is a myth. There are no direct testimonies or immediate historical accounts that support these dramatic exchanges having actually happened

(13) His doctor, Joseph Souberbielle, regularly treated him for a bleeding varicose ulcer on his leg, but unfortunately did not investigate or manage the nature of his deeper, more systemic exhaustion.

(14) ...his incredible workload being a primary one. 

Sources 

Leuwers, Hervé. Camille et Lucile Desmoulins. Un rêve de république. Fayard, 2018.

Leuwers, Hervé. Robespierre. Fayard, 2014.

McPhee, Peter. "« Mes forces et ma santé ne peuvent suffire ». Crises politiques, crises médicales dans la vie de Maximilien Robespierre, 1790-1794." Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 371 (janvier-mars 2013): 137-152.

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