best described as a palimpsest

if he had any inkling of regret at having helped send his ex-friend on the run. Or at this point did he just feel relieved/triumphant that Brissot et al were out of power? I'm leaning strongly toward the latter, since I still feel like Camille probably believed all the things he had written about Brissot, because as far as I know, even post-Girondins-trial-breakdown and in his Vieux Cordelier era, he didn't actually recant his previous attacks. His appeals for clemency weren't because he thought he'd been wrong but because he thought the harsh measures were creating enmity (e.g. VC 4).

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.

And not just anyone. People who actually know the subject.

So this is not some random person online (me, for instance) telling you what “Robespierreist” is. It is a group of some of the best specialists on the question, all of whom have recent work on Robespierre:

Hervé Leuwers is a historian of the French Revolution and of the history of justice. He is associated with the University of Lille and has been president of the Société des études robespierristes. He wrote, in my opinion, the best recent biography of Robespierre.

Another favourite of mine, though mostly for his work on the Vendée (3), is Jean-Clément Martin. He is Professor Emeritus at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution française. His biography of Robespierre also looks at the making of his mythology, and at the Thermidorian contribution to that useful little operation.

Peter McPhee is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and one of the major English-language historians of modern France and the French Revolution. For anyone interested in Robespierre who cannot read French, I cannot recommend Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life enough.

Marisa Linton is Professor Emerita in History at Kingston University. Her work covers the French Revolution, eighteenth-century political culture, virtue, friendship, authenticity, conspiracy, and Jacobin politics. Her book Choosing Terror is one of the most humanising studies of the Jacobins, and a very good account of how revolutionary friendship, trust, fear, and factional suspicion shaped political choices.

Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc are presented as specialists on the construction of the black legend of Robespierre. Marc Belissa is a French historian of the modern period, now maître de conférences émérite at Université Paris Nanterre. His work focuses on international relations, Enlightenment political culture, the French Revolution, republicanism, and representations of Europe in the eighteenth century. Yannick Bosc is maître de conférences in modern and Revolutionary history at the University of Rouen Normandie. His research deals with the French Revolution, republicanism, natural law, republican political economy, property, the commons, and historiography.

Marion Pouffary is a historian of modern and contemporary history, associated with the Centre d’histoire du XIXe siècle. Her thesis studied Robespierre’s image in political discourse from the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, and her book Robespierre, monstre ou héros ? examines the black and golden legends around him.

Last but not least, Nicolas Soulas organises and questions the exchange. He has worked on political, social, urban, family, and cultural history in the later early modern period and the French Revolution, with a particular interest in politicisation, border spaces, and the Payan family.

As I said, this is not really an article as such. It is closer to an interview, where seven specialists answer seven questions.

So… are you a robespierriste?

This is probably the least interesting point in the article for anyone who has read quite bit about the French Revolution, and a foundational one for anyone just starting to learn about Robespierre. What was robespierrisme? Who were the robespierristes?

Both the article and this random person on the internet (me) will give you the same unsatisfying answer: it depends who used the word, when, against whom, and for what purpose.

Robespierrisme was not, despite how it sounds, Robespierre’s political system. Robespierre had plenty of political beliefs (respect for rights, popular sovereignty, support for male universal suffrage, public virtue, suspicion of executive power, and so on)  which others certainly shared and defended. But these were not labelled robespierrisme during his lifetime. In fact, the word had a few rare polemical appearances before Thermidor (4), but it only really spread after Robespierre’s fall, when it became tied to Tallien’s “system of terror”.  From there, it is extended to the exceptional policies of Year II (5). Thirty years later, in the 1830s and 1840s, admirers of Robespierre give the word a positive meaning, treating it as a democratic or revolutionary inheritance.

The word robespierristes is even more loaded. From the summer of 1794, it was used to stigmatise people as supposed partisans of Robespierre, initially linked to the 108 supposed “accomplices” executed after him. The Thermidorian fanfiction imagines that Robespierre had placed his people ( the robespierristes) in strategic posts and built a dictatorship. 

That said, if you had walked down the street in May 1794, met the man, and told him you were a robespierriste, he would probably have looked at you with a very blank expression. Nobody openly called themselves robespierriste while Robespierre was alive. That self-identification appears much later, especially among nineteenth-century left-wing militants. Before Thermidor, the people later labelled robespierristes would have called themselves Montagnards (6), Jacobins (7), patriots, or republicans (8). Not robespierristes.

That said, Belissa and Bosc make a very good point in the article: although robespierrisme did not exist as a self-conscious doctrine, there was a shared Montagnard political culture. For them, this included democratic control of legislative and executive power, plus an economy regulated by the natural right to existence. In the early Directoire (9), robespierrisme could then come to mean the republicanism of Year II, especially for the left, once former Montagnards who accepted the new regime were cut off from that inheritance.

In the same vein, both McPhee and Leuwers accept that Robespierre had a recognisable republican political philosophy, and that this philosophy had supporters. So, for them, there is no stable Robespierrist doctrine, but there is a Robespierrean democratic orientation.

Jean-Clément Martin makes what is, in my opinion, perhaps the most interesting point, when he discusses robespierriste through the lens of historiographical discourse. As with the others, for him, robespierriste is born from a Thermidorian political operation, like terroriste. It is arbitrary and retrospective. While he accepts that there were people politically close to Robespierre, he rejects the idea that the word is useful as a neutral historical category. More than that, he argues that using it as a scientific category risks accepting Tallien’s (10)  framing of the Revolution.

Wait, what? Robespierre had supporters?

First, let’s clear up one thing that may surprise anyone who has only read biased accounts of Robespierre as a dictator: Robespierre had supporters, friends, people who liked him, people he liked in return. He had a whole network around him. They were not his minions.

Leuwers puts it best when he points out that Robespierre was never isolated. He had successive political companionships with Pétion, Buzot, Coroller, Dubois-Crancé, Billaud-Varenne, Desmoulins, and later the emerging Montagne. These alliances evolved, changed, and, in some cases, ruptured over time. Even by spring 1794, after the fall of Hébert and Danton, Robespierre still had many supporters among the Jacobins, the Paris municipality, the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the departments. Lists of “patriots” found among his papers include more than one hundred names, among them Herman, Dumas, Buchot, Payan, and Jullien. Martin and McPhee expand on this point by making clear that the pool of Robespierre’s supporters was fairly large and heterogeneous.

Linton gives a richer account of how personal connections and trust shaped his work within the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security (11). The most interesting point she makes is that ideology alone does not explain loyalty or rupture among the members of the Committee of Public Safety.

In short, she argues that people within the Committee could sometimes agree on certain issues while distrusting each other, and, conversely, they could disagree on things while still remaining friends. She cautions against equating political alignment with personal relationships. She uses Saint-Just and his undelivered speech of 9 Thermidor to show this. 

Saint-Just carefully avoids identifying himself as a political supporter of Robespierre, and chooses instead to defend him as a friend. She also points out that Saint-Just would not have been chosen to give the speech in the first place if the other members of the Committee of Public Safety had seen him as a “robespierriste”.She suggests that, in the final weeks, a gap had opened between Saint-Just and Robespierre and yet Saint-Just still tried to defend him. It was his decision to defend Robespierre without submitting the report to the committees that made him “robespierriste” in the eyes of Thermidor and posterity, not the other way around.

So what were the supporters called?

We have established that Robespierre’s supporters, during his lifetime, would not have called themselves robespierristes. And it makes sense. Doing so would have amounted to social suicide, even before Thermidor.

Belissa and Bosc explain that labels such as Rolandins, Brissotins, Dantonistes, Hébertistes, and later Robespierristes were usually terms used for enemies. In a political culture where “faction” was dishonourable, nobody wanted to define themselves as the client of one man.

Marisa Linton further stresses that being labelled someone’s follower was dangerous, because republican legitimacy was supposed to come from loyalty to the people and the public good, not from personal patronage. What actually existed around Robespierre, she argues, were networks of friendship, trust, and emotional confidence, rather than a disciplined ideological school.

There was a name for his supporters, but it was meant to mock them: Robespierrots. It was designed to ridicule Robespierre himself by associating him with the theatrical figure of Pierrot. (12)

In Year II, the more common terms for Robespierre and those close to his politics were Jacobins and Montagnards. McPhee says that Robespierre himself thought in terms of patriots, people, Jacobins, and Montagnards, and would probably have been horrified by robespierriste.

The weaponisation of “robespierriste”

As mentioned before, being part of a faction was bad, and it had already been used as an accusation. The Thermidorians did not invent the concept. What they did was apply their propaganda machine and turn “robespierriste” into a weapon of post-Thermidorian purification.

Martin points out that immediately after 9 Thermidor, the concept of “robespierriste” did not yet exist. For roughly a month, letters to the Convention still mixed praise and condemnation of Robespierre. This confusion came from slow circulation of information and censorship. Then the term spread through pamphlets and newspapers, especially alongside “terroriste”. It became a tool for constructing a supposed “faction robespierriste”, even appearing in a decree of 30 Frimaire Year III concerning Fouquier-Tinville, Pache, Bouchotte, and their alleged accomplices.

McPhee highlights how hundreds were arrested or judged as Robespierre’s supposed accomplices, sometimes on very thin evidence. Robespierre and his allies were quickly described as tyrants, conspirators against liberty, enemies of the Republic, or promoters of a “system of Robespierre”. The terms “robespierriste” and “terroriste” became interchangeable in local purges.

Both McPhee and Leuwers show that the label sat inside a broader vocabulary of conspiracy, dictatorship, and cruelty: “drinkers of blood”, “knights of the guillotine”, “knights of the cemetery”, “Cromwell”, “Mahomet”, “theocrat”, “murderous intriguer”. It went so far that, retrospectively and rather dishonestly, men who had fought each other in Year II, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville, and others, were grouped together as members of one murderous club.

Belissa and Bosc agree that “robespierrisme” and “jacobinisme” were at once counter-revolutionary inventions, Thermidorian political categories, and later historiographical categories. According to them, in Fructidor, “robespierrisme” and “robespierriste” emerge as elastic non-categories, whose boundaries expand or contract according to political need. Under Year III and the Directoire, almost any militant of Year II who had not joined the reaction could be labelled a creature of Robespierre, an agent of anarchy, or an enemy of property.

Were Babeuf, Buonarroti, and the neo-Jacobins robespierristes?

Kind of. Maybe. Partly, but with caveats.

Belissa and Bosc are quite clear on one point: Babeuf explicitly equated robespierrisme with democracy in 1796. Babeuf (13) and Buonarroti (14) rejected the Directoire’s constitution because they saw it as a confiscation of the people’s natural rights, and they rallied around the Constitution of 1793 instead. They were especially interested in Robespierre’s draft Declaration of Rights, because it placed property below the right to existence. Still, overlap is not identity. Babeuf and Robespierre did not have the same ideas, and they certainly did not have the same methods.

Marion Pouffary is careful about the Babeuf-Robespierre connection. For her, it is both political and memorial. Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, then changed tone after leaving prison and began praising him. Buonarroti later gave this link a more solid shape in Conspiration pour l’Égalité, where he presented Robespierre as one of the “friends of equality”. This mattered a lot for the radical republican left under the July Monarchy (15) , and for the neo-Babouvists around 1840. But Pouffary warns that the link was doing political work. It was also later given scholarly backing by Mathiez (16), whose socialist commitments were not exactly irrelevant to how he read the past. Her conclusion is careful: yes, the connection exists, but as a political construction. Handle it accordingly.

Martin, as expected, is less accommodating. He reminds us that Babeuf attacked Robespierre after Thermidor, accusing him in connection with depopulationist violence in the Vendée. He also points out that the sans-culotte risings of 1795 demanded the Constitution of 1793 without Robespierre, and that many of the “last Montagnards” persecuted under the Directoire had actually opposed Robespierre in July 1794. For Martin, calling Babeuf robespierriste in 1796 was still often an accusation, not a clear political identity.

What does “robespierriste” mean for the historian?

So we know the Thermidorians were a tad bit biased. Fine. But what about the next two hundred years or so? Surely, with enough distance, people knew better.

Well. Not quite.

I have said this so many times on this blog that I am probably a broken record by now: no one is truly objective. Historians write through the lenses of their politics, environment, preferences, and beliefs. Even when modern historians acknowledge their biases and try to correct for them, sometimes even overcorrect, those biases still colour their analysis and conclusions to some extent. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians were not even especially shy about their political preferences. So the meaning of robespierriste, like the reputation of Robespierre himself, shifted depending on who was writing, and when.

But enough of me waxing poetic. Let’s go back to the experts.

Belissa and Bosc frame the historiographical story through moments when a positive memory of Robespierre returns to public debate. After 1830, radical republicanism and socialism built a golden legend to counter Thermidorian slander. Louis Blanc (17) and Ernest Hamel (18) later associate Robespierre with the concept of republican fraternity.

Unsurprisingly, Pouffary gives the most detailed account of this positive robespierriste memory. Under the July Monarchy, radical republicans disappointed by the conservative settlement used Robespierre as a tutelary figure for political equality, social equality, the right of insurrection, and a religion of fraternity. This produced the golden legend of Robespierre as a secular saint.

Yet Pouffary’s lexicometric (19) analysis shows something interesting: robespierrisme and robespierriste remained rare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century printed material, and were usually negative or neutral rather than positive names for a political current. So even these favourable authors rarely present Robespierre as the leader of a clear group. Linton argues that the stigma created by Thermidorian propaganda was so strong that even admirers of Robespierre found it difficult to claim him openly. A more sympathetic memory owed much to Élisabeth Le Bas and Charlotte Robespierre, though their memories were published late and mediated by men. Naturally.

After 1848, with Michelet (21), Quinet (22), and Aulard (23), much republican historiography distances itself from Robespierre and prefers Danton. Blanquists (24) attack the “Robespierre-priest”. Under the Front Populaire(25), Robespierre returns as a figure of republican danger and mobilisation, while the anti-totalitarian wave of the 1980s revives Thermidorian themes.

That said, McPhee traces the positive historiographical tradition from Ernest Hamel’s great nineteenth-century biography to Mathiez, Gérard Walter (26), Georges Lefebvre (27), Soboul (28), Vovelle (29), and Mazauric (30). In this tradition, Robespierre becomes the uncompromising defender of the principles of 1789 and of the Republic against counter-revolutionary Europe. Vovelle’s 1988 “Pourquoi sommes-nous encore robespierristes ?” consciously echoes Mathiez’s earlier “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”

What does robespierrisme mean today, politically and academically?

In short, the word survives more as a political reference or a historiographical (31) problem than as a living doctrine.

Belissa and Bosc argue that in contemporary France, La France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (32) are among the few who openly claim some form of Robespierrist inheritance. In this case, the useful part of Robespierre is his republicanism, his democratic social vision, and his insistence that property must give way to the right to existence and the commons. 

McPhee makes a similar point. For parts of the French left, Robespierre still stands for social justice and civic virtue, especially the refusal to compromise democratic and social principles. But he also warns against pretending that today’s crises are the same as those of the late eighteenth century. They are not. 

Pouffary concludes that Robespierre’s political uses today resemble those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is invoked above all for equality, social justice, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of contesting representatives. During the gilets jaunes (33) movement, his memory could be linked to the right of insurrection. But she does not think there is still a militant robespierriste historiography in the old sense.

There is broad agreement among the historians that current scholarship is far from Hamel’s hagiography, or from the politically marked works of Mathiez and Walter. They are politically subjective, sometimes openly so, but they still circulate because they retain real scholarly value.

No present-day academic historian claims robespierrisme in the Mathiez sense. Mathiez used robespierriste as both a historical and political identity. For him, defending Robespierre meant defending a whole democratic-social tradition: popular sovereignty, equality, the Constitution of 1793 (34), the right to existence, and the revolutionary Republic. When he asked “Pourquoi sommes-nous robespierristes ?”, he was not being coy. He was openly claiming Robespierre as a political ancestor.

Recent scholarship, even when sympathetic, is less hagiographic and more attentive to context, complexity, and choice.

Martin makes a strong methodological point here. He rejects the idea that historians can simply separate the “real Robespierre” from later judgements about him, because the exceptional condemnation of Robespierre is itself part of his historical reality. For him, we cannot understand Robespierre without comparing him to contemporaries such as Brissot, Danton, Barère, Vadier, and others. Nor can we understand him without studying how the monster legend of August 1794 shaped every later reading of the Revolution. 

In conclusion

PSA: be careful who you annoy, because they may turn you and your friends into a dictatorship after your death.

Jokes aside, the article’s strongest conclusion is basically this: robespierrisme is less a stable doctrine than an evolving term. It tells us more about the people using it than about any fixed meaning of its own.

During Robespierre’s life, there were Montagnards, Jacobins, patriots, friendships, committees, patronage networks, shared principles, rivalries, and crises. After Thermidor, all of that was compressed into an accusation: Robespierre had supposedly led a faction and a system of Terror.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that accusation was rejected, reversed, or reworked by republicans, socialists, communists, anti-Jacobins, and historians. Today, the term can still point to a democratic-social republican inheritance. 

From a historian’s perspective, the label should be used carefully: it was created after the fact, shaped by political conflict, and never described a clearly organised doctrine or party.

Notes

(1) Annales historiques de la Révolution française. The leading scholarly journal on the French Revolution, published since 1924.

(2) Literally, “crossed gazes/perspectives”.

(3) He is the leading expert on the civil war in the Vendée.

(4) 9 Thermidor, or 27 July 1794 in the Gregorian calendar, was the day Robespierre was denounced and arrested. He was guillotined the next day.

(5) The Revolutionary Calendar, with Year II, Year III, Frimaire, Fructidor, and so on, was what happened when the revolutionaries scrapped the Christian calendar and started counting again from the founding of the Republic in 1792. As a rough guide: Year II is 1793–94, Year III is 1794–95. Frimaire falls in late autumn, Fructidor in late summer.

(6) The Montagnards, or the Montagne, “the Mountain”, were the most radical bloc in the revolutionary parliament, so called because they sat on the highest benches.

(7) The Jacobin Club was named after the former Dominican, locally “Jacobin”, convent in Paris where it met. It stood at the head of a nationwide network of affiliated clubs, which gave the radicals their organisation and reach. It was shut down soon after Thermidor.

(8) In this period, these were loaded political self-descriptions, not neutral words. A “patriot” meant a supporter of the Revolution; a “republican” meant someone committed to a France without a king.

(9) The government that ran France from 1795 to 1799.

(10) Jean-Lambert Tallien (1767–1820) was a Convention deputy who had himself presided over savage repression at Bordeaux, then turned on Robespierre, partly to save his own neck and that of his lover. He was a ringleader of 9 Thermidor, which is exactly why his self-serving talk of a “system of terror” deserves a healthy dose of scepticism.

(11) The Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security were the two committees that effectively governed France during Year II. The first handled war and high policy; the second ran internal policing and surveillance.

(12) Pierrot was the foolish, lovelorn clown of French pantomime.

(13) Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797) was a radical egalitarian who took the Roman name “Gracchus” and demanded equality and forms of common ownership. His “Conspiracy of Equals” against the Directory failed, and he was executed, but his programme, transmitted by Buonarroti, made him a founding hero of later communism.

(14) Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837) was an Italian revolutionary and Babeuf’s comrade. His memoir of the conspiracy, published in 1828, shaped revolutionary movements across nineteenth-century Europe.

(15) The Restoration (1814–1830) brought back the Bourbon monarchy. The July Monarchy (1830–1848) was a more liberal kingship under a different branch of the family, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. Then 1848 brought yet another revolution and a short-lived republic, followed by the Empire of Napoleon III.

(16) Albert Mathiez (1874–1932) was a supporter of Robespierre who founded the Société des études robespierristes in 1907 and the journal that became the very one this article appears in. He spent his career rehabilitating Robespierre on rigorous archival grounds, while also breaking bitterly with his old teacher Aulard. As one does.

(17) Louis Blanc (1811–1882) was a socialist and a minister in the short-lived revolutionary government of 1848, later an exile in London. His twelve-volume history of the Revolution rehabilitated Robespierre as the prophet of a fraternal, social republic.

(18) Ernest Hamel (1826–1898) was a republican journalist who, in the 1860s, produced the first enormous, wholly admiring biography of Robespierre. It is effectively the founding monument of the “golden legend”.

(19) Lexicometric analysis is a computer-assisted method that counts and maps word frequencies across large bodies of text, to track how usage changes over time.

(21) Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was the great Romantic narrator of the Revolution, whose multi-volume Histoire de la Révolution française cast “the People” as the true hero of the story. He was not much of a fan of Robespierre, whom he portrayed as cold, sterile, and priest-like.

(22) Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was a historian, philosopher, and republican politician. His La Révolution (1865) argued that the Terror was not only a crime, but a blunder that discredited the revolutionary cause. He also faulted the revolutionaries for failing to give France a new religion to match its new politics.

(23) Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928) was a historian who held the first university chair dedicated to the history of the Revolution, at the Sorbonne, and helped build the discipline’s “scientific”, document-based method. He was a partisan of Danton, and his own student Mathiez broke with him precisely on that point.

(24) Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was an insurrectionist whose followers were called “Blanquists”. He spent more than thirty years in prison for plotting armed risings, and embodied a rival, atheist, conspiratorial strand of the revolutionary left that had little use for Robespierre’s deism.

(25) The Popular Front, or Front populaire, was a coalition of socialists, communists, and radicals that won power in 1936. It is remembered above all for paid holidays and the forty-hour week.

(26) Gérard Walter (1896–1974) was a journalist-turned-historian who wrote a major two-volume life of Robespierre, as well as separate histories of the Jacobins, the Terror, and the coup of 9 Thermidor. He also edited the surviving records of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

(27) Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was perhaps the most influential academic historian of the Revolution in the twentieth century, and a pioneer of “history from below”, meaning the study of peasants and crowds rather than only leaders. His work gave weight to a broadly sympathetic, socially minded reading of the First Republic.

(28) Albert Soboul (1914–1982) was a Marxist historian best known for his landmark study of the Parisian sans-culottes. He was the leading post-war figure of the classic social interpretation, which read the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution driven by class.

(29) Michel Vovelle (1933–2018) was a Marxist historian of collective “mentalities” who held the same Sorbonne chair, and served as the semi-official historical voice of the 1989 bicentenary, squaring off against the revisionists.

(30) Claude Mazauric (born 1932) was a Marxist historian in the Lefebvre-Soboul line, and editor of collections of Robespierre’s and Babeuf’s writings. He is remembered above all for his fierce public quarrel with François Furet in the 1970s, defending the social interpretation against the revisionist claim that the Revolution had been fundamentally misread.

(31) Historiography is the study of how history has been written: its changing interpretations, schools, and biases. In other words, not the events themselves, but what people have done with them afterwards.

(32) La France Insoumise is a left-wing party founded in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran of the French left.

(33) The gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, were a leaderless protest movement that erupted in late 2018 over fuel taxes and the cost of living. They were named after the high-visibility vests French drivers are required to carry.

(34) The Constitution of 1793 was the most democratic charter of the era, approved by popular referendum, with universal male suffrage and a right of insurrection. It was suspended “until the peace” and never actually applied.

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.

so i’ve returned from my 3 day paris trip, and i’ve had various people ask me where i saw certain frev related things, or how to find certain locations, so i’ve decided to make a post of everything frev related that i saw, roughly in chronological order :)

so the first place i visited was the pantheon- it was the furthest south out of everywhere else i visited, so if you visit it’s worth putting aside a decent amount of time for getting there and back. here, i saw the national convention monument, and in the crypt i visited rousseau, voltaire, victor hugo, alexander dumas, carnot, and condercet. you’ll also have to pay €13-16 to enter, though it’s free for children and i believe eu residents under 25…

next, i visited the conciergerie- this was also €16 but free for under 18s. this was amazing- there was the statue of robespierre, but also a lot of good information about and artefacts from the revolutionary tribunal, as well as information about the women executed in the revolution. it’s very haunting to know that most of the frev figures spent their final hours in the building that you’re standing in 🥲

i also saw the luxembourg gardens (camille and danton were imprisoned here for a bit)

near there, is the danton monument! it’s just outside the l’odeon metro station, and he has a restaurant and cinema named after him. there’s a little side street almost directly in front of the statue, and if you go down it, you’ll see a plaque which marks danton’s house! 

the next day, i visited the palais royal, where camille gave his famous speech. this was outside the café foy, which was apparently numbers 56-60 on the galerie de montpensier, which is one side of the palais royal :) 

i then went to the louvre which i would Not Recommend. the david paintings were great to see, but There Were So Many People. Not Fun :|

however, here’s the pavillon de flore, the cps building, or at least the partially rebuilt version thereof… it’s on the side of the louvre closest to the seine, and it’s right on the end 

here’s the place de la concorde, where the guillotine was…

i then visited the petit palais, which i really recommended frev-aside- as the name suggests, it’s a pretty small gallery, but it’s got a lot of really lovely paintings, and it isn’t full of tourists! (i say this as a tourist, but anyway….. it’s not full of tour groups, at least) but in terms of frev stuff, it has the d’angers saint-just bust, which is obviously beautiful 

then i visited the duplay/robespierre house, which is 398 rue saint-honoré, and is now a very fancy shoe shop…..

the next day, i visited the père lachaise, and i found eleonore and elisabeth- someone else has kindly marked where to find elisabeth on this map. her grave is sort of down a side street, but it’s right at the start of it, so you can see it from the main road. once you find elisabeth, follow the path down into the bushes (down some stairs) and you come out near eleonore :)) i also found jacques louis david, but his grave is marked on the official map so it’s very easy to find. 

i then visited the national archives museum, and robespierre’s table… they also have a really cool exhibition on lafayette on at the moment, which finishes on the 14th of july, and they’ve currently got napoleon’s will on show until the 29th of june. they’ve also got some of robespierre’s notes on show!!

finally, i visited the carnavalet, which is 100% a must-see for any frev fans 

monument to the republic (specifically the abolition of the monarchy on the statue/engraving thing)

elisabeth, eleonore, and david’s graves 🥲 i left the pink flower on elisabeth’s- next time i will bring one for eleonore too, but i didn’t have enough money, and as i wrote elisabeth to be the protagonist of my play i thought it was fitting that she got the flower :)

THE TABLE (i’m pretty sure the brownish, almost lighter, patches are robespierre’s blood, as opposed to the dark stains…)

some of robespierre’s/the committee’s notes on representatives on mission (?) (thank you @anotherhumaninthisworld !!)

THE PORTRAITS!!! you’ve got no idea how happy i was to see these, i got 0.5s that i will be posting too 😌

sj’s drawing and gun, the thermidor call to arms (more of robespierre’s blood, yay) and couthon’s wheelchair

barere 🤨 why does he look like this

assorted frev stuff!! robespierre’s hair, shaving bowl, and buttons; sj’s, robespierre’s, and le bas’s cocardes; danton’s personalised cutlery; guillotine earrings

models of the hôtel de ville and the chinese bath house 👀

*EVIL GRIN*

I'm so happy they've occupied your brain, too! They would hate me for imagining them in New York, but I like to think it would allow them the space and time to heal, & I like to think they could still drop seeds of revolution in a place where they could possibly flourish. I hope you have a good trip!

OMG we finally finished chapter 4 omgggg it only took over a year 😭 A friendly reminder that you can buy vol 1 of Incorruptible here, both the print version or a pdf if you want to pay whatever price you want for it~

Also...lol a comment @anotherhumaninthisworld made before, made me wanna add this:

palais royal, and exactly where camille made his call to arms!!

pavillon de flore

some jacque louis david paintings (including marat!! and a self portrait)

napoleon’s coronation (ft. someone i’m 99.9% sure is fouché)

liberty leading the people

place de la concord!! (the guillotine was here)

SO MANY SAINT-JUSTS

louise michel my beloved

I'm giving you a corny af ending to this chapter 😌 But cut me some slack, I am a millennial... and since the millennial experience is all about being a 30-smth who's been thrown unexpectedly into a f*cked up world, who is culturally used to shamelessly sharing and unleashing all our emotions at every moment...I think I relate very heavily to The Jacobins lmao

the pantheon!!

(probably) saint-just

marat and carnot (?)

danton and robespierre :)

carnot’s tomb

danton themed EVERYTHING, plus his house

robespierre ft. a 0.5 and actually accurate information???

lucile and a TERRIFYING fouquier bust. why does he look Like That

and finally they were playing lrf in the conciergerie lmao

About a year ago I came over the freshly published German novel Die Farben der Revolution: Eléonore und Robespierre (Jeanette Limbeck) and after a bit of initial scepticism – FREV fiction often tends to be more bad than not – I was actually pleasantly surprised by the result. As the title suggests the novel follows the perspective of Eléonore Duplay through 1791 to 1794, and while it is by no means flawless, it is still a reasonably informed and nuanced one for the standards of many French novels posted around here and definitely deserves a shoutout especially for those who can read German.

The positives

The author has clearly done a fair share of good secondary reading on relevant topics in revolutionary historiography in French and English (Godineau, McPhee, Linton, Leuwers...) and in fact even includes a list of major factual changes or at times inventions at the end of a book (though as we will see later there are a few she missed)

Choosing character on which there are limited sources like Eléonore Duplay can be a bit of a tricky task - it leaves room for invention but also the risk of overdoing it - but for the most part Limbeck succeeded in fleshing her out as a character. A character that shows has artistic and political interests as well as personal friendships beyond her relationship with Robespierre. A character that can be wrong - there is for example a good part in the book where the author decided to make her very enthusiatic for the revolutionary war in 1792 and let her argue with Robespierre on the topic until they finally work it out. Its also pretty good in stressing some of the limits of her outlook as a middle class woman for example as she grows increasingly suspicious of Enragé allied women like Pauline Léon and their "material interests".

And importantly the author for the most part resists the urge to make the main heroine in a historical novel a girlboss who overcomes all the sexist constraints of society through sheer brilliance. Instead she actually has to struggle with them. So, even as she gets more more interested in politics, she has to constantly work on her readings skills to get from basic literacy to actually reading comfortably (and borrow Maximilian's books) because of the limits of her primary education. When she tries to pain classical or revolutionary scenes in her painting lessons, she actually repeatedly realises or is even told by others (thank you David!) that her paintings are stale – which obviously makes sense when female painting students were to allowed to see real male bodies.

While not the POV, Robespierre is overall handled reasonably well - it definitely leans towards a more favourable perspective, especially when the authors can choose between multiple explanations and scenarios, but he is flawed in his own right. It does a pretty good job illustrating the mix of admirable conviction and frustrating self-assurance (eg. he is both very right and very arrogant when explaining why Eléonore is wrong about he war), the limits of his role in the Revolutionary government, not shying away from his growing paranoia (or indeed generally that of revolutionaries), while at the same time doing a good job of making the reader understand it under the circumstances.

For the most part it is also pretty nuanced on a great variety of players at least on the broad revolutionary "left". We can see a Danton who can be frustrating, offensive, vulgar and corrupt but also warm and humane and perhaps a bit more conventionally sympathetic but also naive Desmoulins. We get at first a little distant but increasingly sympathetic Saint-Just and see a lot more of his human side once him and Eléonore warm up to each other. We get sympathetic portrayls of women from the Citoyennes Republicaines Révolutionnaires as well as wives of other revolutionaries like Lucille or Simonne Éverad (who becomes a bit of an older advisor/friend). We even get a couple of sympathetically portrayed Hébertist sympathisers (though usually fictional), which is otherwise pretty rare in FREV media. And it even has a few quite well written interactions between Eléonore and her royalist former teacher, who is portrayed with some human sympathy but is also clearly wrong, not both-siding the issue.

Finally, the relationship between Eléonore and Robespierre is handled generally well – probably better than in any other FREV novel I read. The author goes for a romantic interpretation of the relationship, which is obviously not universally shared and can at times seem a bit overstated, but the relationship itself is reasonably good. You have an element of friendship, admiration, interest so that the relationship does seem natural but also hardly idylic with its arguments and tensions.

Also has some great moments - some more serious personal or political conversations but also funny ones. Eg. when Eléonore and Robespierre eventually start sleeping together (which is again handled a lot better than in most other FREV media), she gets very excited by the fact that she can finally improve her skills with drawing male bodies while he sleeps, only for him to wake up and start panicking what would happen if someone leaks it to the press or if god forbid (!) their children or grandchildren would find it one day.

The controversial/ mixed bag

The whole book is from Eléonore's POV which sometimes creates a tensions between when the author is trying to authentically represent her perspective and when to present a more objective analysis of situations or push her own view. For example, the Girondins basically come of as self-serving hypocrites - which may well be authentic in terms of Eléonore's perpective but is clearly reductionist if it is the author's own. By contrast, Eléonore seems to hold a lot of understanding and even sympathy for the Dantonists until the end (and while she comes to treat the trial as a political necessity, she knows they are not actually foreign agents) - which may be a more nuanced view, but not one that would represent Eléonore's opinions.

As is a bit of a tradition with women in FREV literature the author has decided to make Eléonore a lot more interested in women's rights that we have any indication she would be. Now, given how little we actually know about her, there is certainly some space to do this. In some cases it can be just fairly natural frustration about the limitations imposed on her as a woman in society - whether in the expectations of marriage or the limits on her artistic pursuits, which seems quite realistic. Her interest in issues like family law reform or education or the fact that she attends some meetings of the mixed Société des Amies de la Verité and later even of the SCRR (though she eventually parts with them), don't seem implausible either. But eventually this is simply pushed too far with the author attributing her proto-feminist views that she almost certainly did not have, especially support for womens' right to vote and even repeatedly arguing with Robespierre over the issue (as if that was something widely supported even among revolutionary women). And yes, technically all those conversations happen behind closed doors, but it seems like an instance of the author projecting views she would like the heroine to have.

While the book does a lot of good in constantly reminding the reader that Robespierre is not some bloodthirsty dictator but a member of a collective government in the middle of war, it can sometimes come off as if the burden of blame for things that go wrong is shifted to a couple "extremists" - especially Billaud, Collot, Vadier and Amar – rather then having to explain the variances and complexities of revolutionary violence.

While most characters are quite nuanced, Madame Duplay and Charlotte Robespierre clearly get the short end of the stick - with Eléonore's mother coming of a bit like a kind of Madame Bennet obsessed with securing her daughters' future and Charlotte being pretty much reduced to the jealous sister trope (though again, its Eléonore's POV).

And perhaps most controversially, the author decides to include a plot-point just before Thermidor, where Eléonore with the support of Le Bas (concerned both for the revolution and the fate of their families) try to convince Robespierre to eliminate his enemies by force and temporarily take on the role of dictator. It makes for good tension and Robespierre does quite categorically refuse the suggestion but it is certainly a very 19th century drama/dubious mémoires inspired invention.

The bad

Even apart from the final corrections (usually to do with simplifications, cutting out characters etc), there are at least two strange moments with outright incorrect descriptions of political events. Once it is claimed that appart from baning women's clubs the Convention also banned women from its galleries and from gathering in the streets in 1793, even though that only happened after the Insurrection of Prairial in 1795. It is also implied that the Law of 22 Prairial did away with any judicial process entirely, which is simply an overstatement whatever objections one can have to it.

In a bit of a Hilary Mantel-esque moment the author decides that Robespierre could not simply have come to signing the arrest warrant over Desmoulins of his own volition. Fortunately we are spared fake SA stories (indeed Danton's harasment of Elisabeth is mentioned and taken seriously). Instead, Eléonore makes some politically unsound comments criticising the repression in the Vendée and Vadier then threatens Robespierre that the CPS could issue an arrest warrant for her if he does not agree to add Desmoulins to the list. While I can take overplaying the romantic element elsewhere, this seems simply like a cop-out of a morally uncomfortable decision.

* who has shipped Spirk since that night in 1967 that Amok Time first aired * and helped storm NBC to keep TOS on the air for a 3rd season * and wrote fanfic way back in the day * and was privileged to be around for the earliest days of fandom, when Leonard used to come to your house if that’s where the fan club was meeting and sit on the sofa with you in that Spock hair cut and eat cake

All of you who are writing TOS/AOS fan fiction and creating fan art now: remember, YOU are the ones shaping the traditions of fandom. You have inherited the kingdom. Bless you for keeping it vibrant, growing, alive. In fifty years, you will be the ones who are remembered for molding it and handing it down to the future. It probably doesn’t feel like now, but you are making history.

Your current addiction to TOS and the feels you get when you contemplate the love between Jim and Spock will be with you for life. It won’t always be in the forefront; you will sometimes go years, sometimes go a decade, without Star Trek being more than a passing thought. But then something will remind you and every consuming feeling you feel right now will come rushing back, every bit as powerful and deep and strong as it is today. All there, right where you left it.

The friendships you make in fandom will be with you for life. Like all friendships, they will wax and wane as the focus of your life shifts over time, but you will always be able to pick up the thread. You will — to give you a hypothetical example — be 77 years old and discover Tumblr and get a rush of Spirk feels after a decade of not giving TOS a thought, and contact your 83-year-old fangirl friend in the nursing home, to whom you haven’t spoken in several years. You will open the conversation with, “So, Jim and Spock love each other and that just makes me so happy.” And your friend in the nursing home will sigh and say, “Yes. They do love each other. It’s such a comfort.”

That look that Jim and Spock give each other, of absolute adoration and acceptance and love? That’s real. It’s rare, but it’s real. One of my greatest joys in life is to see my son and his husband give each other looks like that. Of course I don’t know you; I don’t know your strengths and struggles or your place on the spectrum of gender or anything about your sexuality or what you look like or what your life has taught you to believe about yourself, but I do know this: YOU DESERVE TO BE LOVED AND LOOKED AT THE WAY JIM AND SPOCK LOOK AT EACH OTHER. Please don’t accept less than that in your life.

The future of our planet does not seem very hopeful at the moment. But please remember that when Gene created Star Trek, the world was in turmoil and the future seemed very bleak. Star Trek is, was, always shall be about hope. Reach for it. When TOS first aired, we hoped to see some form of a Starfleet on the horizon in our lifetimes. That vision must be passed on to you. Do it. Make the world worthy of launching the human race out into space. CREATE STARFLEET.

You are all creative and funny and amazing. Far more amazing than you know. Be kind to yourselves. Live long and prosper, kids.

If you recall in chap 3, I explored how important the Jacobin Club likely was as a place of connection for Robespierre. I think about that when I read about this boycott/walk out that happened, and the events of the following day- the early impact it probably had on him and the struggle to trust people later on.

if you're coming from the soft-hearted moderates perspective. The >>>forty page<<< translator's preface to Brissot's pamphlet To His Constituents can be summed up as basically "Haha, you bloodthirsty bastards deserved it", but here are some highlights:

"the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a more determined enemy."

"All the members of the Girondin subdivision were as deeply concerned as any of the Mountain could possibly be, and some of them much more deeply, in those horrid transactions which have filled all the thinking part of Europe with the greatest detestation, and with the most serious apprehensions for the common liberty and safety."