putting rocks in jars

The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.

HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.

So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

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.

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

@misscalming I guess this one can be for you… 😉

The first known meeting between Robespierre and Danton is one we know about through the notes the former prepared against the latter, meant to serve as groundwork for the indictment Saint-Just was to write against him and his alleged faction:

I remember an anecdote to which I attached too little importance at that time: In the first months of the Revolution, finding myself at dinner with Danton, Danton reproached me for spoiling the good cause, by digressing from the line where Barnave and the Lameths marched, who then began to deviate from the popular principles

These notes, which were published for the first time in 1843, provide a lot of insight regarding all the things Robespierre felt about Danton’s personality, actions and political views during the five years that followed. It is however hard to tell just how much of them are to be interpreted as what he truly felt as things we’re going down, and how much of them are afterthoughts he came up with once arrived at the conclusion Danton has in fact been a conspirator for a considerable amount of time.

The next connection I’ve found between the two is from June 20 1790, when both are recorded to have been present for yet another dinner, this one held on the anniversary and in commemoration of the Tennis Court Oath, together with among others Romme, Desmoulins, Charles de Lameth and Barnave. On December 25 the very same year Danton and Robespierre also both signed the wedding contract of their mutual friend Desmoulins, alongside twelve others. Only Robespierre was however present for the actual wedding ceremony held two days later.

The first time I denounced Danton to the committee, Robespierre rose like a madman and said that he saw my intentions, that I wanted to lose the best patriots.  Billaud-Varennes during the session of 9 Thermidor

Billaud-Varennes: If the misery of Danton is a crime, I accuse myself of it: because I was the first to denounce Danton; I said that if this man existed, freedom would be lost. If he were in this enclosure, he would be a rallying point for all counter-revolutionaries.  Les crimes des sept membres des anciens comités de salut public et de surete general (1794) by Laurent Lecointre, page 23.

I repeat it for you, Danton is the only representative of the people whose punishment I provoked, since he to me seemed like the most dangerous of conspirators.  Réponse de J.N Billaud, représentant du peuple, à Laurent Lecointre, representant du peuple (1794) page 38.

The last political opinions of Billaud corrected the old ones only on purely individual points. Thus, the death of Danton was then in his eyes a crime, because of the immense services he had rendered.  "Alas!" he would often say, ”I was too directly involved in it and with a terrible hatred. The misfortune of revolutions is that you have to act too quickly; you have no time to examine: you act only in full and burning fever, in fear, I understand, of seeing your ideas aborted.” Billaud Varennes — mémoires inédits et correspondance (1893) page 236-237. Statements made by Billaud in 1817-1819.

However, Billaud is also the only committee member for whom I’ve found any evidence pointing to a strong will to get rid of Danton. As for Collot, who almost always gets lumped in with Billaud here, historian Michel Biard argues in Collot d’Herbois — légendes noires et Révolution (1995) that both the idea that Collot was especially eager to to get the dantonists, as well as the one he and Billaud were close with the hébertists, actually rest on pretty shaky grounds.

did carnot ever say this about the supreme being?? and is there anything to suggest that he and prieur were specifically horrified by the lack of immunity?

what about this? i know that barere helped enforce the ventose decrees to appease sj (palmer discusses it), but was this offered to robespierre too, in exchange of stopping the denunciations?? and what about them fearing hanriot and sj staging a coup???

thank you so much lmao

To start off with Carnot and the Supreme Being, in Mémoires sur Carnot par son fils (1861), Hyppolite Carnot writes the following:

Carnot also openly expressed his displeasure with the way Robespierre seemed to be interpreting the decree of 18 Floréal. It has been recounted that after the Festival of the Supreme Being, where Robespierre had assumed the role of pontiff of the new cult, Carnot ironically placed a crown on his head. This seems entirely implausible to me, as such familiarity was quite out of character for him, and his hostility toward Robespierre had by then become fully apparent. What was even less in keeping with my father's spirit was to treat religious matters lightly. But the anecdote can paint a fairly accurate picture of the impression his colleague's theatrical displays made on him.

Hyppolite nevertheless follows this up with writing his father’s religious beliefs ”were in accordance with the new profession of faith,” citing an intervention made by him at the Convention on May 16 1794 where he is recorded to have stated that ”to deny the existence of the Supreme Being is to deny the existence of nature.”

As for any fears Prieur and Carnot might have had concerning the Law of 22 Prairial, I actually had trouble finding the two saying anything about the law at all, both in Hippolyte Carnot’s memoirs and the biographies Le Grand Carnot (1952) by Marcel Reinhard and Prieur de la Côte-d'Or (1946) by Georges Bouchard.

For the Ventôse decrees, on 4 thermidor (22 July 1794), we do find a CPS decree declaring those are to be implemented within three days. It is signed by several members of both the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security, among them Saint-Just and Couthon. If this was done to ”appease” Robespierre and Saint-Just is not something I’ve found any contemporary source say outright. I think it is more likely this is an interpretation on the part of Palmer (who of course doesn’t cite sources either, I have no idea from where he gets the impression Barère in particular played a big role in getting the committees to go through with the decree on 4 thermidor) and Schama, based on the fact Robespierre is recorded to have shown up to the committee session the day right after this decree was penned down (according to the testimony of the CGS member Philippe Rühl, given on March 23 1795) after having boycotted them for several weeks, and the fact Billaud, Collot and Barère after the fact claimed Saint-Just and Robespierre had ”constantly pressured” the two committees to implement the ventôse decrees. (Réponse des membres des deux anciens Comités de salut public et de sûreté générale… (1795), page 46)

Saint-Just occupied a spacious apartment on Rue Caumartin, which he furnished himself, unlike his previous accommodation at the Hotel des États Unis. The building in which the apartment was located was newly-built and had several precious commodities such as a water pump located in the building’s inner courtyard. It’s also very likely that Saint-Just took advantage of the water pump to have a room converted into a bathroom, a luxury at the time and a sign that he was fairly avant-garde in respects to personal hygiene for his time. 

His choice in furniture seems to have been based on comfort above all, and I suspect he acquired several pieces of furniture second-hand. Shades of blue abound in his home, hinting that this could have very well been his favorite color. It is possible that he designed his apartment as a place where he could comfortably entertain his colleagues, as suggested by the numerous chairs and armchairs found in his apartment. The list goes as follows:

in new zealand, our evil government are trying to legislate definitions of women and men, in ways that are legally incoherent but clearly trying to pave the way for more horrifically transphobic legislation. we have an election in a few months but our main opposition party, and all our mainstream news media, are so spineless and cooked that there's a good chance the ghouls will win reelection.

it took 2 whole months for local terf group 'speak up for women' to get 2,000 signatures on the petition that led to this new bill in our parliament.

it's taken five days for this pro-trans 'they don't speak for us' petition to get 17,000 signatures.

this is a show of support that is really heartening for a lot of trans people in our corner of the world.

cis/ish women, if you're from here but haven't signed yet, please do. and if you're not from here and you know any new zealanders, could you send them this petition? a full fifth of our population lives overseas, and there's a good chance they don't follow the news.

This week I met some friends in Koblentz (1)  and, being me, I couldn’t not go and look up a few history-adjacent places. Koblentz is a pleasant city, best known (at least in my corner of things) for hosting noble émigrés (2)  in the early phase of the Revolution. But I’m not here to talk about émigrés today.

No. Today we’re talking about a man who was buried in Koblentz at 27 and became known not only as an exceptionally capable general, but as an unusually humane one as well. 

In a time that seems saturated with idiotic amounts of violence, it feels worth pausing over a young man who managed to wage war with a measure of mercy and plain decency, enough, in the end, to be mourned by his enemies: François Séverin Marceau.

If you’ve been following what I write and/or you care about the history of the Civil War in the Vendée (3), his name won’t be entirely new. He was one of the most brilliant generals on the Republican side.

But before he went west and, at 22, was promoted to general, François Séverin Marceau was a boy his parents didn’t like.

A rejected child 

Born François-Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers in 1769, he was the eldest child from his father’s second marriage to Anne-Victoire Gaulier. His childhood was not easy. His mother was notably cold and left him with a wet nurse for the first ten years of his life. His father, a local magistrate (procureur), was a spineless man who showed a clear preference for his other children. Marceau was brought up in a harsh environment and felt deeply hurt and singled out by his family’s treatment. The breach ran so deep that he refused to use the family name, “Desgraviers.”

In the middle of this domestic hostility, Marceau found his only comfort in his older half-sister, Emira (4) (a daughter from his father’s first marriage). She, too, was poorly treated, and in practice became his surrogate mother. She educated him, advised him, and shaped his character. Marceau remained intensely grateful, sustaining a quiet, unwavering devotion to her throughout his life.

When Emira was pushed into an unwanted marriage and had to leave their hometown of Chartres, the young Marceau felt entirely alone and close to despair. Convinced that his parents’ coldness was only hardening, he chose to run away and enlist in the army as a form of escape.

A great soldier

At the age of 16, on December 2, 1785, Marceau enlisted in the Angoulême infantry regiment, leaving home with little more than his enlistment bonus of 200 livres. He served relatively obscurely for a few years, spending his time studying the lives of great military captains like Frederick II, Charles XII, and Peter the Great to complete his education. In July 1789, he traveled to Paris and joined the Parisian National Guard, even participating in the storming of the Bastille on July 14.

He later returned to Chartres and entered the local National Guard (5). When volunteer battalions were raised in the autumn of 1791 to meet the foreign invasion, he was said to be the first to enlist in the Eure-et-Loir (6) battalion. With prior service behind him, he advanced quickly: captain, then adjutant-major, and by May 1792 elected lieutenant-colonel.

In September 1792 his battalion was trapped in Verdun during the Prussian siege (7). Marceau argued for a continuing defence, but the local authorities and the defence council lost their nerve and chose surrender. As the youngest member of the council, he was assigned the soul-crushing task of delivering the capitulation to the Prussian king, blindfolded. He lost his savings and equipment in the process, retaining only his sword. He then served briefly under General Dumouriez (8) in the Army of the North, distinguishing himself in several actions.

Marceau was intent on entering the regular army (troupes de ligne) as a cavalry officer. He was sharply disappointed when first offered a sub-lieutenancy in an infantry regiment and protested, arguing that his experience and rank as a volunteer lieutenant-colonel warranted a cavalry post. The complaint was eventually upheld, and on 7 November 1792 he was appointed first lieutenant in the light cuirassiers of the Légion Germanique.

The Légion Germanique was soon sent to the Vendée to reinforce the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle. Marceau’s arrival did not go smoothly. He had barely reached his station when he was arrested in Tours as a “suspect.” The government had opened a strict inquiry into the Légion Germanique, denounced as a disorderly collection of foreign deserters.

Tried alongside his general, Marceau conducted his defence with enough clarity and force to secure acquittal. One of the judges, the representative Goupilleau (9), declared himself struck by Marceau’s character, calling him both a brave soldier and a genuine republican. Released and cleared, Marceau went straight back to the front to resume his service.

A brilliant general

One of the first things Marceau did after returning to the battlefield was to save the life of one of the very men who served the government that had accused him. During the Republican rout at Saumur in June 1793, the political representative Bourbotte (10) had his horse shot from under him and was on the verge of capture. Marceau dismounted, gave him his own horse, and cut a path through the enemy with his sword.

Promoted adjutant-general, he stood out at Luçon (August 1793) and Chantonnay (September 1793). He played a decisive role at Cholet (October 1793), one of the pivotal battles of the war. Acting as a brigade general, he commanded the centre. By holding firm, he bought General Kléber (11) the time needed to stabilise a collapsing wing, turning the fight into a major victory. He was formally promoted to General of Brigade for it.

After a series of defeats brought on by a collection of almost impressively inept superiors, the government consolidated its forces into the Army of the West and, in November 1793, named the 24-year-old Marceau interim Commander-in-Chief. (As an aside, the Vendéan army at the time was led by the 21-year-old Henri de La Rochejaquelein…two very young men at the head of opposing forces.)

In command, Marceau led the army to two final, crushing victories that effectively ended the main Vendéan threat. At Le Mans (December 1793), he and General Westermann (12) launched a hazardous night assault in miserable weather. After brutal street fighting and a brief encirclement, Kléber’s arrival at dawn secured a complete victory. Appalled by the massacre of Vendéan civilians that followed, Marceau put himself at risk to shield several innocents, including the young royalist Angélique des Melliers (13), whom he personally tried to save (unsuccessfully; she was guillotined soon after).

In the last major engagement of the campaign, at Savenay (December 1793), Marceau and Kléber trapped the remnants of the Vendéan army. Marceau charged alongside his staff, helping to bring about the final rout.

Despite saving the Republic in the West, Marceau was sidelined when the official commander, General Turreau, finally arrived and took control. Exhausted, suffering from a severe skin disease (14) contracted during the grueling winter campaign, and disgusted by the ongoing violence, Marceau obtained medical leave in late December 1793 to recover in his hometown of Chartres

A commander in the North

Following his medical leave to recover from the exhaustion and illness picked up in the Vendée, Marceau was sent to the northern frontier in April 1794.

He was first given command of the vanguard of the Army of the Ardennes under General Charbonnier(15) and, as usual, distinguished himself quickly. In May 1794 he led a bold early-morning attack, crossed the Sambre (16), and took Thuin. At Fleurus (17) in June 1794 he commanded the right wing and fought with his usual disregard for personal safety, having two horses shot under him.

After Fleurus, the army was reorganised into the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse under General Jourdan(18). Marceau developed a deep, almost filial devotion to Jourdan, whom he regarded as a mentor. Under him, Marceau helped secure a string of victories in the autumn of 1794, including a sharp cavalry charge at the Ourthe (Ayvaille) and a hard five-hour stand at Düren during the Roër(19) campaign. In late October 1794, he cornered the enemy and captured Koblentz.

It was not all triumph. The 1795 campaign was defined by inertia, catastrophic supply problems, and general misery. Marceau blockaded Ehrenbreitstein and was worn down by watching his men starve.

During a retreat in October 1795, a serious blunder nearly ended in tragedy: one of his officers destroyed the bridge at Neuwied too early, leaving the rearguard under his close friend Kléber stranded. Convinced he had doomed his friend and compromised the army, Marceau grabbed a pistol to shoot himself. Kléber stopped him. Clearly the years of war were taking a toll on the young general. 

In the brutal winter of late 1795, Marceau was sent into the Hunsrück to hold off the Austrians with a small, starving, badly equipped force. His men had no shoes and barely any ammunition. He fought anyway. After a victory at Sultzbach in December, sheer exhaustion on both sides led him to negotiate a winter armistice with the Austrian General Kray(20). The two commanders came away with a real respect for one another.

The final command

When hostilities resumed in the summer of 1796, Marceau was given a thoroughly thankless assignment. With a meagre force of just 25,000 men, he was ordered to hold the line of the Rhine and somehow keep the converging armies of Jourdan and Moreau(21) in contact. It was a defensive brief, very much against his instincts, but he carried it out all the same, fighting constant skirmishes along the Nahe and the Selz (22) . During this period he suffered a violent relapse of his skin disease, and given eighteenth-century medicine it was almost certainly worse than anyone realised, yet he continued issuing detailed tactical orders from his sickbed.

In September 1796, Archduke Charles(23) decisively defeated Jourdan at Würzburg, forcing the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse into a precarious retreat. Marceau was given the rearguard, which is rarely a reward. He fought a series of desperate, bloody delaying actions to secure the crossings of the Lahn at Limburg and Diez against vastly superior Austrian forces. On 18 September, at Freilingen, he endured seven punishing hours of fighting, personally charging with his cavalry and rallying his infantry to secure the army's escape.

The very next morning, 19 September, after successfully covering the retreat through Altenkirchen, he rode forward to the edge of the Höchstbach forest to reconnoitre the Austrian vanguard himself. A concealed Tyrolean marksman shot him there. 

The agony of death

Around 11:00 AM, after positioning his artillery near the edge of the Höchstbach forest, Marceau rode forward to reconnoitre the advancing Austrian vanguard himself. He was accompanied by an engineer and two orderlies. As he watched an enemy hussar, a Tyrolean sniper, hidden behind a tree near the road, fired a carbine shot.

The bullet struck him on his right side. It passed through the flesh of his right arm above the elbow, entered just below his lowest ribs, travelled diagonally through his abdomen, and stopped beneath the skin on his left side.

He understood immediately that the wound was fatal. Abdominal wounds at the time were, in practical terms, a guarantee of a long and unpleasant death. He dismounted quietly. With striking composure, he ordered those around him to keep the injury from the troops so as not to cause panic and asked only that he not be left to fall into enemy hands.

His men carried him from the field, first on their muskets and later on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from a ladder covered with hay and coats. The journey to Altenkirchen took three hours under a burning sun and constant enemy fire; one of the soldiers carrying him was shot dead along the way. Despite the pain, Marceau remained controlled, presenting a calm front to his openly weeping soldiers.

When he reached Altenkirchen, he was met by his mentor, General Jourdan, who burst into tears. Marceau, already fading, was too weak to be moved further. The army, however, had no such luxury. It had to retreat. Jourdan was forced to leave his dying friend in the house of the local Prussian governor and ride on. Before doing so, he wrote to the advancing Austrian commanders, commending Marceau to their honour and generosity.

French and Austrian surgeons, the latter sent by Archduke Charles, worked together to treat him. They removed the bullet, which had lodged just beneath the skin on the left side, and enlarged the wound, but it was an exercise in futility. 

On the first day Marceau suffered persistent nausea, a feeling of pressure in the chest, and general abdominal pain. By the next morning the pain had concentrated sharply in the lower abdomen. Severe urinary retention followed, causing such distress that he had to be catheterised twice. On the final night his condition became critical. He complained of ringing in his ears; the vomiting grew frequent and heavy, eventually mixed with blood and bodily fluids. His pulse weakened and turned irregular, his extremities became icy cold, and he broke out in cold sweats.

While he lay dying, the Austrian generals he had been fighting only days before came to his bedside. The aging Kray, visibly shaken, remained there for a long time, holding Marceau’s hand and weeping. Officers from the Austrian hussar regiments also arrived to pay their respects to the man they had been trying to kill. Through the pain, Marceau was said to remain composed and courteous, speaking to his former enemies with gentleness.

At 1:00 AM on 21 September, aware that the end was close, he dictated his final wishes. He ordered that his remaining meagre possessions be used to settle his debts, with what remained to go to his younger brother and his sister, and he distributed his horses among his friends.

Shortly after signing the document, he lost consciousness and slipped into delirium, speaking incoherently of his soldiers, his battles, and the recent retreat. At 3:00 AM he briefly rallied, recognised the Austrian General Elsnitz at his side, and said quietly, “Mon ami, je ne suis plus rien.” (24)

After a short spell of agitation, his pulse faded, his eyes fixed, and at around 6:00 AM he died. He was twenty-seven.

A resting place for the hero

General Marceau’s funeral took place on 23 September 1796 in the entrenched camp he had constructed at Koblentz. As expected, it was a military ceremony. The French artillery fired its salutes, and, out of respect for the man who had technically been their prisoner, the Austrian guns replied in kind. He was buried beneath a simple earthen pyramid.

Kléber soon decided that this would not suffice. He opened a subscription for a proper monument and drafted the design himself. At least, that is what Marceau’s most complete biography by Hippolyte Maze (25) claims. The city of Koblenz disagrees. They insist that the architect was Peter Joseph Krahe. Personally, I have no idea who is right, and, if I am honest, I am not sure it matters that much. Yes, if his friend Kléber, who also happened to be trained as an architect, had designed it, that would be touching. But whether it was friendship or municipal planning, the result is still a gigantic pyramid.

Exactly one year later, on 23 September 1797, Marceau’s body was exhumed, placed in an iron coffin, and carried to the Petersberg, where it was burned in the presence of the entire army, a specific wish expressed by Kléber. His ashes were collected in a marble urn engraved Hic cineres, ubique nomen (“Here the ashes, everywhere the name”). The urn was set inside the pyramid, right beside the remains of another young general who had died in September 1797 in Koblentz, Lazare Hoche (26), who by an irony of fate, had also had a decisive influence on the course of the war in the Vendée.

This is the monument that I visited in Koblentz.

As I mentioned, it is a large pyramid with a reclining lion at the front. The original relief was a trophy; the lion, meant to signal restrained strength, was added in 1855 by the sculptor Philipp Bohl (27). It is an impressive structure, perhaps slightly excessive for a man generally described as modest.

Each of the four sides of the pyramid carries an inscription. Most of them are in poor condition and half-consumed by moss. I tried to piece them together through a combination of staring at the stone for far too long and checking original sources.

The front is a dedication from his men and it reads:

Il vainquit dans les champs de Fleurus, sur les bords de l’Ourthe, de la Roer, de la Moselle et du Rhin. L’armée de Sambre et Meuse à son brave général Marceau.

In English: He was victorious on the fields of Fleurus, on the banks of the Ourthe, the Roer, the Moselle and the Rhine. The Army of Sambre and Meuse to its brave general, Marceau.

The left side is an elegy from his enemy, the man who held Marceau’s hand as he died:

Je voudrais qu’il m’en eût coûté quatre de mon sang et vous tinsse en santé mon prisonnier, quoique je sache que l’Empereur, mon maître, n’eût en ses guerres plus rude ni fâcheux ennemi.Alluding to the words of the Austrian general, Baron de Kray.

Roughly translated: I would have wished it had cost me four of my own men and that I might have kept my prisoner in good health, even though I know that the Emperor, my master, had in all his wars no harsher or more formidable enemy.

The right side is the most damaged. On the monument itself I could only make out fragments, but a period engraving preserves the full inscription. It recounts his death:

L’armée de Sambre et Meuse, après sa retraite de la Franconie, quittait la Lahn. Le général Marceau était chargé de couvrir les divisions qui défilaient sur Altenkirchen.Le 3e jour complémentaire de l’an IV (28) , il faisait ses dispositions au sortir de la forêt d’Höschbach lorsqu’il fut mortellement atteint d’une balle. On le transporta à Altenkirchen, où sa faiblesse obligea de l’abandonner à la générosité de ses ennemis. Il mourut entre les bras de quelques Français et des généraux autrichiens.

In English: The Army of Sambre and Meuse, after its retreat from Franconia, was leaving the Lahn. General Marceau had been tasked with covering the divisions as they marched toward Altenkirchen. On the third complementary day of Year IV (28), he was making his dispositions as he emerged from the forest of Höschbach when he was mortally struck by a bullet. He was transported to Altenkirchen, where his weakness made it necessary to leave him to the generosity of his enemies. He died in the arms of a few Frenchmen and Austrian generals.

Lastly, the back inscription, the least damaged and, in my view, the most pointed:

Ici repose Marceau, né à Chartres, département d’Eure-et-Loir, soldat à seize ans, général à vingt-deux ans. Il mourut en combattant pour sa patrie le dernier jour de l’an IV de la République française. Qui que tu sois, ami ou ennemi de ce jeune héros, respecte les cendres.

In English: Here lies Marceau, born at Chartres in the department of Eure-et-Loir, a soldier at sixteen, a general at twenty-two. He died fighting for his country on the last day of Year IV of the French Republic. Whoever you are, friend or enemy of this young hero, respect his ashes.

The man with lots of tombs

Sadly, his ashes were not really respected and ended up being divided more or less everywhere.

Understandably, one of Marceau’s companions in arms gave a portion of his ashes to Emira in 1798. She and her family kept them carefully in a small alabaster urn, and these are the only ashes we can actually account for. Emira gave a portion to Marceau’s fiancée, who may or may not have lost them. She also gave a portion to a friend who helped her secure a pension from Napoleon.

Less understandably, in 1804 thieves broke into the monument hoping to find silver coins or valuables (keeping it classy by robbing a dead man who was, in fact, broke). They overturned and emptied the marble urn, scattering Marceau’s ashes on the ground. The ashes were gathered up as carefully as one can gather ashes, and the urn was kept at the Koblenz prefecture until the imperial government ordered the monument repaired and the urn returned with the appropriate ceremony.

In 1819, the construction of new Prussian fortifications at Ehrenbreitstein required the monument to be moved. The stone pyramid was dismantled and rebuilt a short distance away near the main road. The main urn, and whatever ashes were meant to be inside it, vanished completely. As far as I have been able to find, no document ever bothered to explain what happened to it during the move.

When Emira died on 6 May 1834, she was buried with the ashes she still had. The portion she had given to her friend was later handed to the city of Chartres, which placed it in a cavity inside the statue erected to Marceau’s memory in 1851 on the Place des Épars.

On 25 July 1889, for the centenary of the Revolution, the box containing the ashes was removed from Emira’s tomb. On 10 August, together with the remains of Lazare Carnot (29), La Tour d’Auvergne (30), and Alphonse Baudin (31), the ashes of General Marceau were transferred to the Panthéon (32) with great ceremony. They now rest in the same vault. He is the youngest person to be buried at the Panthéon. 

The last portion was in the possession of Marceau’s brother-in-law, Sergent-Marceau (33). Those ashes somehow ended up in the hands of the Musée de l’Armée in 1943 and were deposited at Les Invalides (34)  in 1947.

So, in summary, half of Marceau is simply gone, and the other half is split between three places: his statue in Chartres, the Panthéon, and Les Invalides (potentially four, if the fiancée did not lose her share and it was passed down somewhere in the family, who knows). Which means what I saw in Koblenz is a cenotaph.

I am sure there is some neat cosmic metaphor in there about the unloved child who ends up either scattered to the wind or adopted by an entire nation and turned into an example. Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher, and I will spare you the attempt. You are free to extract your own symbolism.

That being said, if you have made it to the end of this essay, first of all, I am mildly impressed, and secondly, thank you. Thank you for reading about a man who did his job well regardless of the circumstances and who, in an environment defined by violence, tended to err on the side of restraint and compassion. If there is a lesson in Marceau’s life, it may simply be that decency is not automatically cancelled by the times one happens to live in.

Notes

(1) A Rhine frontier city at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine. In the early years of the Revolution, it became a well-known gathering point for aristocratic émigrés.

(2) French nobles (and other opponents of the Revolution) who fled abroad after 1789, often organising political and military opposition from border courts and refugee hubs.

(3) For those new to this blog, the Civil War in the Vendée refers to the counter-revolutionary insurrections in western France (1793–1796), driven by a mix of anti-conscription protest, religious conflict, and royalism. It was the largest counter-revolutionary movement of the period.

(4) Marie Jeanne Louise Françoise Suzanne Marceau Desgraviers (1753–1834), Marceau’s much older half-sister, who acted as a mother figure to him. She led a rather interesting life herself: married at sixteen to a much older man, she divorced him when the Revolution legalised divorce, and later married for love the engraver Antoine-François Sergent.

(5) The town-based citizen militia created in 1789, which in provincial centres like Chartres became both a security force and a key local political institution.

(6) Eure-et-Loir was one of the original departments created in 1790, with Chartres as its prefectural centre.

(7) France was at war with much of the European continent because the Revolution collided with established dynastic politics and monarchical solidarity.

(8) Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez (1739–1823), a Revolutionary general who commanded major armies in 1792–93 before defecting to the Austrians in 1793.

(9) Jean-François, Marie Goupilleau de Fontenay (1753–1823), Convention deputy and representative on mission, active with the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle in 1793.

(10) Pierre Bourbotte (1763–1795), Convention deputy and representative on mission; one of the political commissioners attached to armies in the west.

(11) Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753–1800), one of the Republic’s ablest generals. He fought in the Vendée in 1793, in the Army of the North from 1794 onward, and later became famous for the Egyptian campaign before being assassinated.

(12) François-Joseph Westermann (1751–1794), a hard-driving Revolutionary general prominent in the Vendée campaign; executed in Paris in 1794.

(13) Various sources attribute differing degrees of romance to this relationship. What we do know is that Marceau signed a certificate attesting that she was a good citizen and had voluntarily surrendered herself to him. It proved useless, as she was guillotined nonetheless.

(14) Most likely he had scabies (gale). “Scabies” refers to infestation by Sarcoptes scabiei, spread by close contact and notoriously common in crowded, impoverished conditions such as winter campaigning, prisons, and barracks. Older French sources often use gale, and medical writers also employed terms such as gale répercutée to describe a supposed “driven-in” form following misguided treatment (likely referring to complications arising from untreated or improperly treated scabies).

(15) Louis Charbonnier (1754–1833), Revolutionary general who commanded the Army of the Ardennes in 1794.

(16) The Sambre, a river running through northern France and Belgium, joining the Meuse at Namur; a major operational line during the 1794 campaign.

(17) The Battle of Fleurus (26 June 1794), a decisive French victory that helped secure the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) for the Republic.

(18) Jean-Baptiste Jourdan (1762–1833), a highly capable commander of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and later closely associated with the Revolutionary conscription system.

(19) “Roër” commonly refers to the Rur River theatre in the Rhineland (fighting around crossings and towns such as Düren), and later also gave its name to the French département de la Roer (1797–1814).

(20) Paul Kray von Krajowa (1735–1804), a senior Habsburg commander in the Revolutionary Wars who repeatedly confronted French armies on the Rhine front.

(21) Jean-Victor Moreau (1763–1813), French general who commanded the Army of the Rhine and Moselle in 1796; later an opponent of Napoleon and mortally wounded while campaigning with the Allies in 1813.

(22) The Selz, a small river in Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany) flowing into the Rhine; part of the manoeuvre zone during the 1796 Rhine operations.

(23) Archduke Charles of Austria, Duke of Teschen (1771–1847), Austria’s most prominent commander of the Revolutionary era.

(24) “Mon ami, je ne suis plus rien.” in English: “My friend, I am nothing now.”

(25) Hippolyte Mazé (1839–1891), a nineteenth-century French writer and politician.

(26) Lazare Hoche (1768–1797), Revolutionary general who played a major role in suppressing the Vendée in 1796 and later commanded on the Rhine; he died in 1797 at the age of twenty-nine.

(27) Philipp Bohl, a nineteenth-century sculptor active in Koblenz.

(28) Le 3e jour complémentaire de l’an IV: The French Republican Calendar ended each year with five or six “complementary days.” Year IV’s third complementary day corresponds to 19 September 1796.

(29) Lazare Carnot (1753–1823), engineer and leading revolutionary statesman, member of the Committee of Public Safety, and central architect of wartime mobilisation policy.

(30) Théophile Malo Corret de La Tour d’Auvergne (1743–1800), celebrated infantry officer nicknamed the “First Grenadier of France,” killed in action in 1800.

(31) Alphonse Baudin (1811–1851), republican deputy killed on a Paris barricade while resisting Louis-Napoléon’s coup in December 1851; later memorialised as a republican martyr.

(32) The former church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, converted in 1791 into a state mausoleum for figures honoured for service to the nation.

(33) Antoine-François Sergent, known as Sergent-Marceau (1751–1847), engraver and Revolutionary politician; he married Émira Marceau and adopted the compound surname.