Jade

All six Saint-Justs I’ve drawn so far! Can you spot them all? Who is your favorite SJ?

Maxence Mailfort in Lazare Carnot ou le glaive de la Révolution (1978)

Now this Saint-Just is of course Thermidorized considering this is a Carnot movie, but there's something I love about him that completely disappeared after the 1980s. More than the way his curls bounce when he moves his head, which I obviously adore too.

He's not a brooding sulking attack dog like in La Révolution française: les années terribles or a petulant brat throwing a tantrum like in the BBC docudrama.

First of all, I feel that you can see Denis Manuel's influence from La Terreur et la Vertu. Now Manuel's performance is from the perspective of the Robespierristes, in the intimacy of a group where Saint-Just is more likely to drop his facade, much like Robespierre himself. It's very subtle in LTELV, but he's clearly acting different when he's at the CSP. There's something more rigid and formal, though it might be hard to catch. Unless you've watched it a million times like me.

Mailfort takes Manuel's performance and cranks up the arrogance, rigidity and coldness. That's the face he gives those he doesn't let inside his intimacy. That's also, arguably, the one he wanted to project publicly.

Most interesting is to compare the three different versions of the same scenes given by La Terreur et la Vertu, Saint-Just et la force des choses, and Lazare Carnot ou le glaive de la Révolution, most specifically the night of 8 to 9 thermidor. That's because they are all based on the exact same primary sources. Unless I forget one, there is only two accounts of that night, one found in a response written by Barère, Collot, Billaud, etc. and one by Prieur (de la Côte-d'Or) that Hippolyte Carnot put in the memoirs on his father. The aspects the movies decide to keep, to cut, or to change in their adaptation of the scene say a lot about how narratives are constructed.

Denis Manuel's is playing Saint-Just as he feels he might actually have been. Maxence Mailfort is playing the performance of Saint-Just that Saint-Just gave to the outside world. He understands his political theatricality. I feel that when you put them together, you get an idea of Saint-Just's fascinating, jarring personality the way Gateau and Lejeune described him.

The only other performance I know that rivals these is the one by Krzysztof Kwiatkowski in Edward Wojtaszek's 2015 adaptation of Thermidor. The original text by Stanisława Przybyszewska is... not always great. Much like Büchner, she has some strange interpretations that belong to her context - I mean, we know how Andrzej Wajda's Danton turned out. But Krzysztof Kwiatkowski really lifted the sometimes caricatural or archetypal Saint-Just who Przybyszewska wrote, and gave him depth in that he could switch from haughty coldness to manic vulnerability depending on who was around him (I'll let you guess). I think that's one of the greatest failures of Patrice Alexsandre. He just didn't embody this duality. His delivery of "je me consume de rage patriotique" is just...

...yeah.

Thuillier thinks it's hilarious. Thuillier should not think it's hilarious.

He can't just say that he's being consumed by patriotic rage: I have to feel it. Alexsandre's performance often feels a bit flat because he chose a middle ground that lacked both Mailfort's terrifyingly controlled theatricality and Manuel's internal depth - and you absolutely need both in a story that centers Saint-Just.