(Saint-Just)ify my Love

Illustrated by Severino Baraldi

(Caption)

On October 5 the Royalists began swarming down the avenues leading up to the palace. Armed with clubs and muskets, they shouted "Long live the king!" as they advanced. Napoleon ordered his men to fire. The cannons made a loud roar. Grapeshot scattered over the mob. mowing down hundreds of people. The rest fled in panic. Less than two hours later, all was quiet.

Illustrated by Severino Baraldi

Desmoulins in a letter to Robespierre, published in number 29 (June 14 1790) of Révolutions de France et de Brabant 

Hello! I agree vm with you on this!!

I see much ADHD behaviour in Camille (and write him as such to be that way in my comic, based on rl friends who he reminds me of) To add to his outward behaviours and choices, some of his personal reflections on his own inability to reign in his up and down feelings, make me feel even more certain on this. I can't think of a stronger testimony than when it's coming straight from the person experiencing it~

I haven't done very much in depth reading on Saint-Just yet (I plan to of course, but I simply haven't gotten around to it! There' so much to read about in Frev XD) but I also get autism vibes from him, from what I've read and contemporary observations of him. I'm less certain about this compared to Robespierre, but only because I'm not super knowledgable about him. I know @saintjustitude has talked about this alot, and I think knows ALOT about SJ, so maybe he can weigh in on the reasons he thinks Saint-Just might be autistic :3

The dyslexia topic - his specific spelling style and the "mistakes" he makes aren't reflective of dyslexia. Like @18thcenturythirsttrap mentions, the "correct" spelling hasn't been fixed yet by the Académie française.

Bernard Vinot says he's being "creative" with his spelling by randomly doubling consonants where people in his era didn't do that, which is something I would have ascribed to autism - not caring about prescribed rules and making your own instead. But I discovered something else. Claude-Antoine Prieur, who was born and raised in the same region (Auxonne) as Saint-Just stayed in (Decize) until he was around 9yo, also doubled his consonants (and has poor writing in general):

(Bouchard's biography on Prieur de la Côte d'Or, 1944, p. 24.)

This makes me wonder two things: 1) if the doubled consonants are the sign of their different regional accent and/or 2) if it's just how French was taught in that region:

See? It's close. They were both in Bourgogne. (Carnot too, but Carnot doesn't make mistakes because he's a Perfect Nerd like Robespierre. Tldr: Carnot and Prieur were also very likely autistic. The CSP was autistic-on-autistic violence.)

Now, the autism.

That's more a feeling I get as an autistic person myself because Saint-Just is unfortunately very good at concealing who he truly was. But that already might be a sign.

See, his oldest (Gateau, Lejeune) and closest (Philippe and Élisabeth Le Bas, but also Gateau) friends who left testimonies all agree on one thing: Saint-Just is very hard to understand, and his personality seems split in two. Or rather, he has a mask he puts on when he's in public. A public persona. It seems to confuse many of them. Nodier rambles it made him "untrue" to himself (though he also argues that via physiognomist nonsense) but that doesn't sound very strange to most autistic people. We learn to mask who we are, pretend to be someone we aren't. It's exhausting, but if you've always done it, it comes "almost" naturally. If Saint-Just was autistic, it would explain that ease in shifting between his private and public personas - which often seemed "terrifying" to some of them, or "like he committed violence against himself" (Lejeune).

Saint-Just was extremely sensitive to rejection and criticism. His letter to Daubigny, which we were never supposed to see as it was an unsent draft, says a lot about his inner turmoil. The letters to his editor Beuvin also give some hints to his personality. He can't wait to be older, and he wants to be taken seriously more than anything. When you've hurt his feelings, you're basically dead to him. He doesn't forgive. It's extremely likely that Desmoulins and Hérault, considering their personalities, made jokes intended to he light-hearted that Saint-Just either didn't understand or took as insults. You don't casually joke with him. You don't toy with him. He's not going to smile and take it. He chafes at authority, especially if it's unearned. Unlike Prieur for example, he doesn't defer to his elders just because they're his elders. This is what makes them see him as arrogant and haughty and prideful - that plus the mask he keeps on.

Moreover, for someone who put so much importance in friendship, he actually had very few close friends. He rarely let people in. The fact he avoided the Duplays to go directly to Robespierre's room says something about his social skills. Robespierre seemed actually much more at ease in social settings and when he needed to do networking. Saint-Just despised small talk and gossip. (I'm sure that made Barère both mad and fascinated.) He rarely intervened at the Convention outside of planned speeches/reports. When he presided, he also hardly spoke - unlike others who interjected more often. Though he did go at the Jacobins, he didn't frequent them quite as much. He seems to surround himself with solitude and mystery.

There's also this anecdote told to Fleury by an old woman who used to be a friend of Saint-Just's sisters back in the day. She reports that, as a kid most likely, he was always in the charmille, where he read or walked alone reciting out loud from his books, then sometimes showed up to say "ominous things" and make predictions, and that the girls admired him yet were also terrified:

(Édouard Fleury, Saint-Just et la Terreur, vol. 1, 1852, p. 15-16.)

(That honestly feels like my own childhood lol.)

Some describe him as talking "like an oracle", and Barère says "he deliberated like a vizir":

(Memoirs on Carnot written by his son, vol. 1, 1861, p. 342.)

...which never made a lot of sense to me, unless he attributes to vizirs some mystical aura? But maybe it's completely unrelated, I'm just not sure what he means there tbh.

Looking at women warriors in isolation, it is also easy to accept the way in which the accomplishments (or even existence) of a specific woman warrior are dismissed. That Telesilla or Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer or Artemisia II didn’t do what the sources claim she did. That an unknown man stood behind Matilda of Tuscany pulling the military strings. That Fu Hao played no more than a symbolic role on the battlefield. That Mawiyya or Kit Cavanagh didn’t exist. That any ancient remains buried with a sword are male. That the women who stood on the ramparts and fought back don’t count as warriors because if they were soldiers (and therefore men) the fact that they stepped forward to fire a cannon or picked up a rifle wouldn’t be worth remarking on. Looking at women warriors in isolation, it doesn’t matter that Katherine of Aragon successfully defended England against invasion because everyone knows the important part of her story is Henry Tudor’s inability to father a son. You can overlook the fact that Alexander the Great or Edward the Elder of England had a sister who led troops into battle. When you step back and look at women warriors across the boundaries of geography and historical period, larger patterns appear—parallels not only between the stories of the women themselves but in the ways their stories are told and not told. Some times, places, and social structures are more accepting of women warriors than others. (As a general rule, horse-based cultures, honor cultures, and tribal societies do a better job with the concept than large empires or regular armies—with the extraordinary exception of China.) The accomplishments of women are questioned, undercut, and ignored by scholars in consistent ways across periods. There are unexpected linkages between women, particularly between mothers and daughters—looked at in the context of Cynane, Matilda of Tuscany, Katherine of Aragon, and Amina of Zazzau, the legend that the Trung sisters learned the arts of war from their mother seems a lot more possible.

But the main thing that struck me when I looked at women warriors across cultures rather than in isolation is how many examples there are and how lightly they sit on our collective awareness. I began with hundreds of examples. I ended with thousands. (…) 

Exceptions within the context of their time and place? Yes. Exceptions over the scope of human history? Not so much. Insignificant? Hell, no!”