Welcome to my little corner of the internet dedicated entirely to Augustin Robespierre (Bonbon).
If you've somehow wandered in here by accident: Haallloooo! I'm Abel!!! This blog exists as an archive for my historical writing, source analysis, translations, and ongoing research surrounding one of the French Revolution's most overlooked and underrated figures.
Everything posted here is arranged as is for relatively easy navigation (i'm. still work shopping it). Rather than digging through years of personal posts, memes, and sudden emotional breakdowns because I remembered something from 1794, you'll (hopefully) find a growing collection of organized research in one place!
This is, above all, an attempt to understand Augustin as a historical person rather than a historical footnote.
I try to distinguish clearly between documented history, historiographical interpretation, and my own speculation whenever possible. If I discover that I've misunderstood a source or overstated a claim, I will happily correct it! History deserves that much.
This blog also serves as a home for some translation projects intended to make material more accessible to English readers. I don't believe knowledge should remain inaccessible simply because a source happens to exist only in a select European language.
Above all else..
This is Augustin's space!
You can contact me on Discord, @ 9thermidor
❛ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━・❪ ♝ ❫・━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ❜
> A few quick notes…
> I am not a professional historian. I'm simply someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time reading and memorizing material, biographies, memoirs, correspondence, and contemporary newspapers because I adore this ridiculous little man.
> because of this aforementioned memorization, most of what i post is often first pass thoughts or information detailed right off the dome / noggin. The way that I organize my thoughts and figure out a direct solid defensible line of thought is dialogically, but I don't have anybody to.. engage in dialogue with.. so to remedy this and the unavoidable mistakes that come from my process:
> I welcome corrections, additional sources, and discussion with more than open arms. In fact anybody who makes a comment or addition to my post is guaranteed a first-born from me. If you know something I don't, please tell me! I'd much rather improve a post than leave an error, shoddy wording, or bad pacing standing.
> correction simply isn’t opposition to me, and it isn’t a challenge to authority or ego; it’s part of the process itself. It’s how history becomes more accurate, more nuanced, and more honest over time.
> More than anything, I want this space to reflect a kind of shared curiosity rather than a one-person authority, I am NOT an authority. If that was even an assumption to begin with, assume it no more!!! If you’re here and you know more, or you see something differently, that perspective has value, as part of the same ongoing attempt to understand the past as clearly as we can.
> If you're here from my main blog: yes, unfortunately, it's still, by technicality (Functionally?), 'me♜'. Different room, and different voice, and different person: In the same overall house. This account simply exists so our historical work has a proper home without requiring people to sift through unrelated posts to find it, if the yap-fest above didn't make it clear.
> If you've somehow become interested in Augustin or those surrounding him in life because of this blog..
> mission accomplished!!!
> This blog is ran on EST / GMT-5 + GMT-4
TAG DIRECTORY ──
✦ #timelines — Chronological reconstructions of Augustin's life and missions.
✦ #historical analysis — Source-based essays and historical discussions.
✦ #historiography — How historians, memoirists, and later writers have interpreted Augustin over time.
✦ #personality analysis — Attempts to reconstruct his character from contemporary evidence.
✦ #political life — Mission work, speeches, committees, decrees, and political activity.
✦ #personal life — Family, friendships, correspondence, and the people around him.
✦ #alternate history / speculation — Clearly marked "what if?" posts and historical speculation.
✦ #blog stuff — musings and housekeeping.
✦ #anon — Anon asks etc etc
PROJECTS IN PROGRESS ──
⋆ BOOK / TRANSLATION
Dr. Jan ten Brink — Augustin Robespierre
Dutch → English Translation
Progress: 61 / 251 pages translated (as of Jul. 3)
Started Jun. 10 • Two-week hiatus completed • Resuming throughout July
⋆ UPCOMING ESSAYS / POSTS
• Tracing Augustin's Radicalism-to-Moderation Arc
• The Complete Lebon Story
• What Became of Augustin's Circle after Thermidor
• Augustin's Reputation During His Lifetime
• Gambling, Dissipation, and the Origins of a Reputation
• ..and whatever new rabbit hole I accidentally fall into next.
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Speculating About Bonbon: Relationships with peers Including Ones I Can't Quite Confirm
Okay, quick note before we start: I'm way too lazy to rewrite this because I originally wrote it as if I were talking to myself. So, if you see me accidentally say "we," assume it's the royal "WE," not "we" as in. the fandom. This is just the extent of my knowledge.
A companion piece to the Allies and Adversaries posts, but explicitly speculative — these are the figures from the wider frev world whose relationship with Augustin falls somewhere between "definitely something there" and "we literally have no idea." The methodology here is: here's what we know, here's what's documented, here's what can be reasonably inferred, and here's where the inference runs out.
Philippe Lebas: The Closest Thing to a Peer Friendship We Have
Starting here because this one has more documented warmth than almost any other relationship in the file;
Lebas — deputy from Nord, idolizer of Maximilien, eventually Élisabeth Duplay's husband — meets Augustin through the Convention in spring 1793. The oranges-in-the-gallery scene from Young is the first documented moment of them together: Marat's trial day, Charlotte and Élisabeth in the gallery, Lebas and Augustin accompanying them, the oranges being shared, the shy flirtation beginning. Augustin and Élisabeth presumably talked while Lebas tried to work out how to speak to her. (dork)
Then Lebas falls ill and he's confined to his room for weeks. Maximilien comes to visit but Lebas is too. sshhyyy to ask for news of Élisabeth. Then Augustin comes, and Lebas tells Élisabeth later:
"Robespierre the Younger came to see me. What joy for me! I was more familiar with him. We were the same age."
"We were the same age" — they were born within a year of each other, which Lebas is giving as an explanation for why he felt easier with Augustin than with the Incorruptible. With Maximilien he was formal and couldn't ask what he needed. With Augustin he could be "more familiar." Augustin then, apparently unprompted, praised Élisabeth at length — a service to his friend, delivered without being asked.
This is the most relaxed documented interaction Augustin has with any fellow deputy outside his brother. No politics, and no mission logistics, just two young men roughly the same age, one of them visiting the other in illness, the conversation landing on a mutual friend and a woman one of them is falling for. Young doesn't make much of it but I think it matters — it's one of the few moments in the record where Augustin seems to be functioning as someone's friend rather than someone's brother or someone's representative.
Lebas, of course, died on 9 Thermidor, shooting himself rather than submit to arrest. He was 28. On July 25, four days before, he had dinner with Augustin, Maximilien, Saint-Just, and David in a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées.
Saint-Just: Buddies-in-Law, With Complications
The simplest framing: they were probably friendly because they were both Maximilien's people, and that's probably most of it. But there are a few specific things that complicate or texture the picture.
Saint-Just, as far as the record (i have) shows, did something genuinely useful for Augustin during the Army of Italy period: when a general who had fallen foul of Saint-Just had to be reassigned from the Rhine, Saint-Just apparently helped smooth over the complications this created for the Army of Italy operation. Young mentions this briefly. It's a small practical thing, but it's the kind of thing that builds goodwill between political allies.
The July 25 dinner — four days before Thermidor, possibly the last time most of them were together — has Saint-Just at the same table as Augustin. Young says it "is said" (so: reported but not certainly confirmed?) that they dined together at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées.
The more complicated piece: Saint-Just was working throughout summer 1794 for a reconciliation between Maximilien and the rest of the Committee, trying to prevent an open rupture: Augustin, who was simultaneously trying to build a case against Carnot and push his brother toward confrontation rather than compromise, may have been working at cross purposes to this — or at least operating on a different strategic calculus. Young notes: "Augustin may have feared that his brother might be talked into some sort of compromise." If Saint-Just was the one doing the talking, that's a tension worth noting, even if it never broke into open conflict.
What I don't have: any direct correspondence between them, any recorded conversation, any moment where Saint-Just speaks about Augustin or vice versa in documented form: The relationship is inferred from proximity, shared political position, and the July 25 dinner. Friend-in-law with possible strategic divergence at the end. That's the version..
Couthon: The Complicated One
Couthon is more interesting than Saint-Just for Augustin-watching purposes, because there are two specific documented moments that don't quite go together.
First: Augustin wrote to Couthon in the late spring of 1794 about the treatment of Saliceti, calling him "the true conqueror of Oneglia" and asking Couthon to intervene on behalf of the Army of Italy's operations. This is cordial, professionally warm correspondence — Augustin is using Couthon as a channel to the Committee, which implies a basic trust in his. willingness to be helpful.
Second: Young notes, in the context of the decree governing the armies in spring 1794 (the one where Augustin was trying to support his plans he made with Napoleon, and it got shot down), that it was "also signed by Couthon, Robespierre's friend, but Couthon was a man of independent mind." The qualifier is Young flagging that Couthon signed things Maximilien wouldn't have wanted — meaning he didn't simply follow the Robespierre position. He was an ally but not a satellite.
Third: The Gaillard account of Charlotte's visit in May 1794 includes a scene where she takes Gaillard to see Couthon. The conversation goes badly, Couthon apparently makes a move toward his guards, Charlotte physically stops him like an overly eager TSA agent at the airport (good thinking girl), and Gaillard flees. This is Charlotte's mess rather than Augustin's, but it shows the Robespierre adjacent circle's relationship with Couthon had edges as well as warmth.
Of course. Couthon dies on 9 Thermidor alongside Maximilien and Augustin. Whatever the tensions, they ended up on the same side at the end — whether by shared conviction or by structural inevitability of having been associated with the Robespierre platform.
So. The speculative summary: Augustin probably had a working relationship with Couthon built on genuine shared politics and some practical mutual usefulness, without it being the tight personal bond Maximilien had. Couthon's independence of mind would, I think, have been both useful (he wasn't predictable in a way Augustin could manipulate) and occasionally frustrating (he signed things Augustin didn't want signed).
The Indulgents: Shared Conclusions, Completely Different People
The interesting thing about Augustin's relationship with the Dantonist/Indulgent circle is that he and they arrived at roughly the same political position — the Terror has gone too far, mercy is now the patriotic argument — through completely different routes and from completely different political cultures.
Danton's circle was urban, loud, socially. whats the word. gregarious, financially compromised in ways that gave them complicated motives for wanting the Terror to stop. Camille Desmoulins was Danton's closest friend, a journalist using wit and brilliance to make political arguments that sometimes aimed at actual reform and sometimes aimed at 'protecting people he personally liked'. Their "indulgence" was partly genuine and partly self-interested, and Camille himself — as Young quotes Thompson — was motivated more by mischievousness than by systematic conviction. His aim, in the end, was allegedly to 'not to moderate the government but to destabilize it'.
Now what i can speak for: Augustin's moderation had completely different roots: five months in the departments watching what the Terror actually produced in practice, a body of administrative decisions freeing people from prison, a set of letters to Maximilien articulating a specific theory about what the Revolution had passed the point of needing. He got to "indulgence" through observed consequences rather than through. personal loyalty networks. or journalistic wit.
Does this mean he sympathized with the Dantonists? Young is careful here: "it may be thought that a plea for clemency would greatly appeal to Augustin, but though his opposition to the crude anti-clericalism of Hébert's newspaper continued unabated, he does not seem to have felt much interest in Hébert's journalistic rival."
This is worth sitting with. Augustin's moderation and the Vieux Cordelier's moderation were making similar arguments, but he apparently didn't find Camille's version particularly compelling. Young speculates he may have "mingled at times in the same circles" — Mme Sainte-Amaranthe's gaming house is specifically named as a place where both Augustin and Danton's friends might have turned up — but notes no friendships seem to have grown from these encounters (especially as Augustin himself was banned from going there by Big Brother).
Camille Desmoulins specifically:
Camille made fun of Augustin. The Courtois-quoted Desmoulins line — "the very sound of young Robespierre's voice is foolish" — is hostile, dismissive, and delivered by someone with a nasty wit. Camille was also, as noted, tangled up in Maximilien's orbit in ways that generated complicated feelings all around: He was not someone Augustin had reason to like.
Danton himself:
the April 1794 letter where Augustin congratulates Maximilien on Danton's arrest and announces he "had always known Danton was a traitor" is very revealing. Young describes this as "an astounding insight" — meaning she finds it implausible as a long-held genuine view rather than a retroactive claim designed to demonstrate loyalty to Maximilien's position. It reads (to me) like Augustin performing the correct response to news he hadn't wanted to hear, by going further than the situation required. "Naturally, he was always a traitor" is what you say when you need to demonstrate you're not sad about it.
Hérault de Séchelles:
guillotined with Danton by the time Augustin comes back from his missions. Young notes his seat on the Committee was never filled, creating a gap that affected the Army of Italy operations. Augustin would have had opinions about Hérault, since Hérault had Committee responsibilities that overlapped with areas Augustin cared about, but those opinions aren't. well. preserved.
And then Fabre d'Églantine himself is just too peripheral to Augustin's specific story to speculate usefully on.
The Ruling Pattern
Looking at all of these together: Augustin's closest documented warmth is with people in his immediate physical orbit (Lebas, the Duplay family) rather than with the broader political circles. He was not, apparently, someone who formed friendships through the Convention or the Jacobin Club in any casual networked way. The sociability that gets attributed to him — the gaming house visits, the "fond of the company of women," the bon vivant reputation — doesn't map onto documented Convention friendships the way it might for someone like Danton or Desmoulins, who operated through dense social networks.
His alliances were mostly functional, mediated through Maximilien's connections, or formed on the road during missions among people he was working alongside intensively. Which tracks with what we know about him more broadly: he formed attachments through sustained proximity and shared practical work, not through the salon or the club.
And with figures like Couthon and Saint-Just, where there was enough shared politics to create a working relationship, it stayed at that level — working relationship, ally of the project, person at the same dinner table four days before the end. Not the kind of warmth Lebas's letter captures. Not the kind of enmity Bernard's denunciations capture. Just: people operating in the same political structure, with occasional friction and occasional mutual usefulness, until they died together.
Sources:
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Lebas illness passage chapter 8; Desmoulins/January 5 passage chapter 10; Couthon and the committee decree chapter 16; the July 25 dinner chapter 20; Danton arrest congratulation letter chapter 14.)
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. (April 1794 letter congratulating Maximilien on Danton's arrest; Couthon correspondence.)
@anotherhumaninthisworld compilations — the Courtois-quoted Desmoulins line; Lebas's letter to Élisabeth quoted in Hamel.
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.
mannn what was I thinking, “I’m not gonna write because I’m emotional and stressed” pssshhstttt as if. since when has that ever stopped me. writing is the coping mechanism. writing is the response. writing is the con-se-quence. stress doesn’t stop the writing — it becomes the writing. I write when I’m happy, I write when I’m stressed, I write when I should probably be doing literally anything else. WHy do i write like im running out of time
Augustin and Joseph Lebon: A Political Relationship in Five Acts
The Lebon story is one of the longest continuous threads in Augustin's life — starting before the Revolution in Arras, running through the Convention period, climaxing during the final weeks before Thermidor, and ending with Lebon's execution afterward. It's also one of the clearest illustrations of the difference between Augustin's instincts and Maximilien's, and of what happened when those instincts came into direct conflict.
Act One: The Presbytery Dinner (1791)
Joseph Lebon appears in Augustin's life at a dinner. Maximilien has returned briefly to Arras in late 1791, and Lebon — then a constitutional curé in a nearby parish, prominent in the Arras Jacobins, devoted admirer of Maximilien — invites both brothers to his presbytery. The meal is cooked by his parish clerk, a man named Morel, who would later tell the historian Paris this about the evening:
"Morel never included Robespierre the Younger in the same reprobation as his brother. He was a man of peace who only asked to dine quietly; when he saw [Maximilien] Robespierre and Lebon getting excited he tried to calm them and lead them to other thoughts."
Young finds this slightly surprising given Augustin's "extreme views" at the period, and suggests an alternative reading: "another explanation might be that Augustin had already begun to dislike and distrust Lebon and was not pleased to see Maximilien talking openly to him." Which fits rather well with everything that follows.
(coughs jealousy much /j)
Young's description of Lebon at this stage is pointed: "He had a fund of unclerical language and critical people such as Augustin might have found him to be vulgar, treacherous and pushy." The word "critical" is doing a lot there. Lebon in 1791 is a man performing revolutionary enthusiasm, calculating advancement, trying to attach himself to the Robespierre name. Augustin, who had been watching local Arras politics closely for two years and had a particular sensitivity to people who performed ideology for career purposes, clocked this early.
Act Two: The Jason and Legray Affair (September 1792)
By the fall of 1792, Lebon is Mayor of Arras and Augustin has become provisionally Procureur General. The relationship is structurally collegial but personally difficult. When two commissioners from Paris — Jason and Legray — arrive in Arras and claim to have found financial irregularities, Lebon arrests them: Augustin takes the commissioners' side in the municipal assembly, arguing that since they came from Paris, interfering with them endangered "the progress of the legislative power."
Young's reading of this episode is interesting: she thinks Lebon arrested the commissioners primarily for local political reasons — to establish himself in Arras — and that Augustin's defense of them was about Parisian authority rather than personal loyalty to Lebon. Both men were positioning, using different arguments, for different reasons. The episode shows them capable of operating in the same space without being on the same side.
What's also visible here: Lebon, according to his biographer Jacob, emerged from this episode having "rendered an immense service not only to the town but to humanity." He was very good at getting credit. Augustin, who helped resolve the situation, features mostly as a procedural voice: The dynamic of Lebon absorbing political benefit from situations involving both of them is already present.
Act Three: The July 1793 Letter (July 1793)
By summer 1793, Lebon has become a suppliant to the Convention — an understudy who stepped into a vacant seat. Augustin writes to Buissart, and what he writes is worth reading carefully:
"You mention the new deputy; I've suspected him for a long time; he knows more about intrigue than delicacy or good faith; he will harm the Republic by his extravagances; he's too original for me. I wish you would tell me if it is true that he wishes to convoke the primary assemblies to elect a new Convention... We need to know what is behind the mask."
Three things are notable here. First, "I've suspected him for a long time" — this is retrospective, but credible given the 1791 dinner dynamic. The distrust predates the Convention period. Second, "knows more about intrigue than delicacy or good faith" — a political rather than personal charge. He is describing a man who performs loyalty instrumentally, which is exactly what Lebon was doing. Third, and most revealing: "what is behind the mask." He is asking Buissart to investigate, to gather intelligence: Not venting but rather an attempt to build a case.
Meanwhile, Lebon was still publicly treating Augustin as a dear friend. When admitted to the Paris Jacobins, he made a speech calling it "the happiest day of his life, the anniversary of the day the reactionaries of Arras had sought to arrest Augustin and himself." He was performing intimacy with the Robespierre name for an audience. Augustin, who had just privately described him as a masked intriguer, had to sit through this.
Louis Jacob, Lebon's biographer and defender, claimed Augustin's antipathy was "base jealousy" — that Lebon was surpassing him in the Convention and he couldn't stand it. Young is skeptical, and I think correctly. It's true that Augustin got one vote when he stood for the Colonial Committee that summer (Lebon ironically signed the voting results), which was humiliating: But the distrust predates Lebon's rise and is articulated in substantive terms — intrigue, extravagance, bad faith — rather than in terms of competition.
(coughs/j)
Act Four: The Pas-de-Calais Crisis (Floréal — Messidor Year II)
Lebon's mission in the Pas-de-Calais became one of the most extreme provincial terror operations in Year II. The statistics are documented: 392 executions in a department that had seen no significant federalist revolt. People guillotined to the sound of martial music. Families destroyed for "comic opera crimes" — including one man whose parrot cried "God save the King," though Young notes with grim amusement that the parrot itself was spared (thank god/j).
Buissart wrote increasingly desperate letters to Maximilien. Mme Buissart came to Paris in person, staying at the Duplay house, practically in Maximilien's antechamber. The letters made clear what was happening:
"We are so longing to see Bonbon. When is he coming? Only he can calm the ills that are making your country desolate."
And separately:
"The arrival of Bonbon would no doubt hinder [Lebon]; it is the hope of true patriots and the terror of those who dare to persecute them. He knows the people of Arras too well not to do them justice. His place can't be taken by anyone else."
Meanwhile, Maximilien was receiving letters from Lebas at the front: "Hurry Lebon's return; he has done much good and is worth a garrison in Cambrai." And from Guffroy: "[Lebon] has killed patriotism in Arras... Hébert has not done more harm than he." These two letters directly contradict each other, and Maximilien had to choose which voice to listen to. He chose Lebas. He recalled Lebon to Paris for questioning in floréal, accepted his justification, and sent him back — escorting Charlotte home in the process.
This is the episode that creates what Young calls "a shadow on relations between the two brothers — something the machinations of other intriguers had not managed to achieve." Maximilien's continued support for Lebon against the explicit testimony of Buissart, Guffroy, and eventually Augustin himself, was a genuine rupture in a relationship where Augustin had previously accepted almost every correction without complaint.
Act Five: The Return and What It Might Have Changed (Messidor Year II)
Augustin arrives back in Paris in late June/early July 1794. Mme Buissart is still there, at the Duplays. Guffroy has been trying to reach him. The Arras situation is unresolved..
What happened next is partially documented and partially inference. Luzzatto argues — and it's credited by Young as at least plausible — that Augustin's return was the decisive factor in Lebon finally being recalled definitively. The Committee of Public Safety ordered Lebon's permanent recall on 22 Messidor. That's approximately two weeks after Augustin got back to Paris. Luzzatto writes: "it was only after Robespierre jeune's return from the Midi that the Committee of Public Safety decided to recall Lebon, that is, assumed the responsibility of stopping the slaughter." Young hedges more: she doesn't claim Augustin was definitively responsible, but notes the timing.
Guffroy had written to Augustin directly: "put an end as soon as possible to the pains of those who, in Arras, are true and sincere friends of liberty." We know Augustin agreed to meet the Arras patriots. We know he brought them to Maximilien. We know from Guffroy's own account that Augustin was working the problem. Whether he was the decisive push or one of several converging pressures: the result held. Lebon was recalled. Shortly after, the new revolutionary tribunal in Arras was suppressed. The guillotines that had followed Lebon across the Pas-de-Calais and into Nord were dismantled. A few weeks later, Young notes, the municipal council of Arras ordered the seizure of miniature guillotines — "about two feet high" — that local children had been using to guillotine birds and mice. (yay!)
The petition from Arras asking that Augustin be sent there as representative on mission was reportedly delivered on 10 Thermidor. The day he died.
What the Lebon Story Shows
The long arc from the presbytery dinner to the final weeks makes a few things visible:
Augustin's read on Lebon was correct and early. He flagged him as an intriguer operating behind a mask in July 1793. By summer 1794, Lebon had proven this in the most extreme way imaginable. Being right didn't help — not immediately.
The Lebon situation was one of the very few things where Maximilien and Augustin were genuinely on opposite sides. Not publicly — they never had a public confrontation about it — but structurally. Maximilien accepted Lebas's endorsement. Augustin accepted Buissart's testimony. Both men's information networks were telling them different truths about the same person, and they processed them differently. This is partly a difference in what they prioritized — military effectiveness versus civilian justice — and partly a difference in what they were willing to see.
And there's something specifically interesting in the fact that it was this issue, of all the things Maximilien and Augustin disagreed about, that created what Young calls a genuine shadow between them. Augustin had absorbed the January 5 rebuke in silence. He'd watched his political development be managed and contained through successive missions. But watching Maximilien do nothing about Lebon while Buissart's letters stacked up — watching the people of Arras get destroyed while Maximilien accepted Lebas's cheerful reports at face value — seems to have been the thing he couldn't fully absorb.
The fact that he may have finally moved the needle, in the last weeks of his life, while simultaneously trying to build a case against The Levée en Mass-Murderer Carnot and navigating the most dangerous political crisis of the Revolution — that compression of events is very Augustin. Too much, too late, working too many angles at once, with the clock already running out.
The petition arrives on the day he dies.
Sources:
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 3, 4, 6, 19 — the presbytery dinner via Morel/Paris; the Jason and Legray affair; the July 1793 letter to Buissart; the Pas-de-Calais crisis chapters; the summer 1794 denouement and Vesoul's post-Thermidor defense of Augustin.)
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025. ("Only Bonbon" chapter — the Lebon crisis in full; the 22 Messidor recall timing argument.)
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I. (Buissart's letters; Guffroy's letter to Augustin; the July 5 1793 letter to Buissart flagging Lebon.)
Guffroy, Armand Joseph. Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices. 1795. (Guffroy's account of approaching Augustin; the Leblond/Maximilien/Carnot meeting; the staircase scene.)
Paris, A.-J. La Terreur dans le Pas-de-Calais et dans le Nord. Arras: Rousseau-Leroy, 1864. (Morel's account of the presbytery dinner; Saint-Pol district statistics.)
At first glance, it might look like your run-of-the-mill excerpt from a fanfiction or something..
..but alas! It is not.
It's actually from the novella I'm currently translating!!
You'll just have to wait and see the context, my friend. 👀
Okay, jokes aside, I am really excited. The first few chapters focus almost entirely on the Indulgents, Robespierre, and everything surrounding them (like the duplays!!!!), and the reason I had to take a two-week break is because I finally reached a chapter that includes Bonbon and absolutely could not contain my excitement
I'm #ill, I know
I have no idea whether Dr. Jan ten Brink knew so much because he actually studied the Revolution in depth, but if he did.. it definitely shows. There's a surprising amount of historical material woven into it that a run of the mill fiction author wouldn't know. It doesn't feel like "generic stereotypical fictional French Revolution stuff, go!!" It actually feels like it was written by someone who understood the period and cared about getting it on the target at least, which has made translating it a lot of fun so far.
I'm planning on continuing some time in the next week, if I'm not melted into my chair soon..
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A lot of posts about Augustin — including some on this blog — describe him as becoming "more moderate" over the course of Year II as if it were a smooth linear gradient. It wasn't. The shift was uneven, episodic, and left some real ugliness in the record before it completed.
What follows is an attempt to trace it stage by stage, precisely, using what's actually documented at each point:
Stage One: The Aboyeur
(October 1792 — June 1793)
The Augustin who arrives at the Convention in September 1792 is not a moderate by any stretch. From the first months, he is identified by hostile observers as one of the "ferocious aboyeurs" — the hecklers who make Girondin speeches impossible. A 1814 commentator recalled him in this period as one of those "who only spoke of killing the Royal Family, their old servants and even well dressed men and women." Young notes this is somewhat overstated and doesn't match his actual speeches, which focused on Girondin politics rather than random aristocratic violence. But the general picture is accurate: this is a man throwing himself into factional warfare with. considerable enthusiasm.
The April 5 Jacobins speech is the clearest document of where he was politically. He is calling on good citizens to come to the Convention and "force us to arrest the unfaithful deputies." Not arrest as a vague future possibility — force it. Now. He wrote to Buissart afterward with what can only be described as glee:
"I'm almost a great man since Saturday... don't be surprised if I give myself great airs, the incense is likely to stifle me if I don't disperse the smoke that has gone to my head."
The Catherine Clere case is where this phase is most damning, and Young is characteristically direct about it. Catherine Clere had been sentenced to death for causing a disturbance about food supplies. Several Girondin deputies argued for a reprieve: she was drunk, she knew nothing of politics, the punishment was disproportionate. Augustin opposed the motion. "We have passed a law against Royalism, and those who speak against the law are Royalists." She was executed. Young's note on this: "A Catherine Clere in Vesoul would, at worst, have got a very severe telling-off." The contrast is almost too neat. Not a year later he is doing exactly what he refused to do here — releasing people arrested on thin pretexts, insisting that denunciations motivated by personal grudge rather than real political threat don't justify detention. Catherine Clere in spring 1793 gets the hard line. The women of Vesoul in pluviôse Year II get the careful inquiry.
The pistols in the Convention belong to this same window. Lanjuinais's (iffy) memoirs note that Augustin and others on both sides were waving them around during the heated debates of May-June 1793. On June 2, when Lanjuinais was trying to speak, Augustin and Legendre were among those who physically tried to drag him from the tribune. The Girondin purge was, in its final hours, partly a physical confrontation and Augustin was in it.
Stage Two: The Road Changes Him
(July — August 1793)
The Nice mission begins July 19. The first weeks are not yet a moderation story. At Manosque, where the federalist section members had seized their carriage and forced them to flee, Augustin's first letter back to Paris strikes a hard tone — a tone that seems to foreshadow punishment. Young quotes a passage suggesting the municipality of Manosque had "little to look forward to except immediate death." Five days later, however, the same letter had modulated considerably: they had "dispersed the panic," explained the Convention's principles, "spent a long time to do away with all ill-feeling, and now everything is peaceful and enlightened." The shift across those five days is visible in the document itself.
The Aix-en-Provence letter from August 28 is the clearest early evidence of the intellectual shift forming. Augustin sits down to write to Maximilien from "the most beautiful town in the world" and produces something decently analytical:
"One has to be very skilful to do good in these southern departments. You do not well understand the situation of these unhappy countries... People are exalté, incapable of reason... The crimes of some men calling themselves patriots have made it inevitable that other citizens should have united against disturbing vexations... it would be easy to mislead them with the greatest ease. It is obvious to me that if the patriots wish to punish all rebels indiscriminately, the civil war will be interminable."
This is not yet a policy position: It's an observation — and a tentative one, since he ends by asking Maximilien to correct him if he's wrong. But the germ is there: the machinery of revolutionary repression is creating the resistance it claims to be suppressing, and the people running it locally are often "stupidity personified." Young's note on this letter is precise: "it is greatly to his credit that he saw it with so little bias... Paradoxically the passionate South had calmed him."
Stage Three: Nice
(September — November 1793)
The Nice period is complicated because the decree record shows two simultaneous things that the later moderatism narrative tends to flatten into one. On one hand, the first documented acts of administrative clemency appear here — the September 26 release of an elderly infirm man, the egg decree for hospital patients, the Genoese trade protections, the careful management of émigré property to prevent corrupt sales. These are the decrees of a man learning to administer rather than to purge.
On the other hand, this is also the period where the Toulon operation is building, and Augustin's letters about Toulon have none of the restraint that will characterize Vesoul. "We will date our next letter from the ruins of Toulon" is in a collective dispatch he signs. He is present at and participant in the political atmosphere that the other representatives are creating. Barras and Fréron have already written to Maximilien in October that they will only be happy when Toulon is "put to fire and blood" — and Augustin is now operating in the same political environment, even if his instincts are pulling in a different direction.
The key evidence that he was already ideologically differentiated from Barras and Fréron at this stage comes from the latter pair themselves. From November 13, before Toulon even falls, Fréron is writing to a friend that it is "essential that Barras and I... can take the frightful measures we have concerted to destroy Toulon without anyone putting spokes in our wheels" — a formulation that only makes sense if there is already someone whose moderation they fear. By the time Toulon falls, Barras and Fréron are explicitly complaining that Ricord and Augustin constitute a moderating pair whom they distrust.
So the Nice period shows: individual administrative decrees of real clemency, an intellectual understanding (formed by August) that indiscriminate repression is counterproductive, but an inability or unwillingness yet to turn either of those things into a public political position. He is moderating in practice in the departments he administers while still moving within the same rhetorical framework as the ultraradicals around him.
Stage Four: Toulon
(December 1793)
This is the moment the moderatism narrative is most uncomfortable with, and it deserves direct treatment rather than elision. Augustin signs the Toulon reprisal orders. A letter from him, Ricord, and Fréron, dated December 8, reports that "firing squads are operating non-stop; naval officers have already been exterminated. The Republic will be avenged as it deserves." His signature on that document.
Two days after entering the city, he leaves — unusually early, without telling Barras and Fréron, in a direction they didn't know about. Whether this departure was moral discomfort with what the reprisals were becoming, or political calculation, or simple eagerness to be first to Paris with the news: Young is honest that it's impossible to say definitively. What is documented is that Fabry, the military historian, writes: "he had a heart too highly placed to waste his time in massacres." And that Young herself says simply: "he will have been glad to go."
The gap between what he signed and what he left is real. His position at Toulon is not yet the position he will take in Vesoul: and the shift is not yet complete.
Stage Five: The January 5 Incident
(January 1794)
He comes back to Paris having watched all of this operate. He goes to the Jacobins on January 5. The club is mid-flamewar between Hébert and Desmoulins. He doesn't take sides in the personal dispute. He calls out Hébert specifically for his role in "the movements in the departments relating to worship" — the dechristianization campaign that Augustin has been watching devastate communities across the Midi and that he has been quietly opposing in his administrative decisions for months.
Maximilien shuts it down in forty seconds. The public rebuke is immediate. Augustin goes quiet and into society.
What is significant about this moment: it's the first time the intellectual position formed in Aix-en-Provence, practiced in individual decrees in Nice, becomes a public political argument. And it fails instantly. But the argument is now on record, and he takes it with him on his next mission.
Stage Six: Franche-Comté
(January — March 1794)
This is where the shift completes, and the decree record from Mathiez's Annales révolutionnaires (1916) makes it legible in granular detail. The pattern is not just release decrees — it's a specific, repeated formula that shows deliberate legal reasoning rather than ad hoc mercy.
Jean-Baptiste Theurey: arrested for refusing to attend mass. Augustin's decree: "considérant que les motifs de cette arrestation sont injustes et intolérants." Unjust and intolerant — not just insufficient evidence, not just procedural error. A moral judgment on the arrest itself. Marie-Anne Euvrard: arrested for religious opinions and preferring refractory priests. Decree: "cette opinion devant être isolée de la Révolution." This opinion must be isolated from the Revolution — meaning it no longer constitutes a revolutionary threat requiring suppression. The Menoux parishioners: fourteen people from one village, arrested for refusing to attend certain masses. Released. The Gray mass release decree: a group arrested "only for simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate" — freed collectively, with the reasoning that their existence "ne trouble point l'ordre public." Does not disturb public order.
None of this is vague benevolence. It's a specific legal theory being applied consistently: religious practice has ceased to be politically actionable. Persecuting people for it now is not vigilance, it is manufacturing enemies. He is also, simultaneously, arresting his own agents for overstepping — Maillot and Maignan are seized for abusing their mandate. The moderation is not laissez-faire. It is a harder line against the abuse of revolutionary power by the people supposedly defending it.
The February 24 letter to the Committee of Public Safety from Lyon is the self-articulation: "il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" — "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized." And from the Précis des opérations: "Rien n'est plus facile que de conserver une réputation révolutionnaire aux dépens de l'innocence." Nothing is easier than maintaining a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence.
What the Arc Actually Shows
The standard framing — Augustin became moderate because he was naturally gentle and the missions revealed his true character — is partially right and partially misleading. What's actually visible is:
He was not gentle in Paris: Catherine Clere happened. The aboyeur period happened. He was a partisan in a vicious factional war and behaved accordingly.
The shift was produced by experience, and not by nature surfacing. The Aix letter is the first evidence of the intellectual position, and it comes specifically from watching the southern departments at close range. The Nice decrees show it being practiced before it's articulated. The January 5 speech shows it becoming a public argument. The Franche-Comté decrees show it becoming systematic policy.
The shift was not linear. He signed Toulon reprisal orders in December 1793. He was releasing religious prisoners in Vesoul in February 1794. That's two months. Between those two things lies the January 5 rebuke by Maximilien, whatever he made of that, and five months of watching what repression actually produces in practice.
And crucially: it was never a retreat from the Revolution. The Précis makes this explicit. He is not arguing that the Terror was wrong in principle, or that the Republic should be softer, or that the enemies of France deserved clemency. He is arguing that the Terror has passed its useful point — that continuing it now serves the Republic's enemies more than its friends, because it fills the jails with harmless people while the actually dangerous ones navigate the machinery of denunciation for their own purposes. It is a revolutionary argument for ending a phase of the Revolution. That's a very different thing from moderation as such.
Which may be why it was so difficult to say out loud at the Jacobins in January, and why Maximilien shut it down so fast.
Sources:
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 8–13 for the full arc; the Catherine Clere passage and Sainte-Claire Deville commentary; the Aix-en-Provence letter; the Toulon chapter and Fabry quotation.)
Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130. [The Theurey, Menoux, Euvrard, Gray mass release decrees.]
Augustin's Précis des opérations, in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I, p. 260.
Michon vol. I: the Aix-en-Provence letter (p. 183–84); the February Lyon letter; the Buissart correspondence.
Poupé, Edmond, ed. Lettres de Barras et de Fréron en Mission dans le Midi. Draguignan: Latil Frères, 1910. (The November 13 letter establishing Barras and Fréron's pre-existing fear of Ricord and Augustin's moderation; the post-Toulon letters.)
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.
anotherhumaninthisworlds compilations — the January 5 Jacobins exchange in full, via Jacobin club records.
yoohiihello hey
I suggest that um. people who are on here and who do alot of historical writing or informative posts turn this blog setting on, if you haven't already:
I've already seen a good amount of posts from tumblr be recycled for Google AI overviews through websites like tumgik and tumlook, so this probably also applies to other AI's like ChatGPT or something.
why do you never use the first names of Guillodon de La Saudraye?
Oh, this is an easy one! It's mostly for recognition and consistency.
Most people who know of her at all will recognize her as Guillodon de La Saudraye, or even more simply La Saudraye.
It's also much easier for people to search my blog or Tumblr in general if I'm consistently using the same name every time!
The same logic applies to Sauli. I generally just call him "Sauli" rather than "Gaspare/Gaspard Sauli," because it keeps posts consistent and makes it easier to recognize that I'm referring to the same person across different discussions.
It's also not a convention that's unique to her. We do this with men constantly without really thinking about it. People usually say Robespierre, not Maximilien Robespierre, and Danton, not Georges Danton, unless there's a reason to use the full name. The surname effectively becomes the person's identifier.
Additionally, her husband isn't really a historical figure of much note, so there's basically no risk of confusion if I just say "La Saudraye." I don't think anyone is going to stop and wonder, "Wait hmmm.. is Augustin making heart eyes at the wife, or the husband?"
If I suddenly started referring to her as Jeanne-Rosalie Guillodon, I think most people would have no idea who I was talking about. She's already a fairly obscure historical figure connected to another obscure historical figure, so using the name she's most readily recognized by just makes communication easier.
There's also a practical reason: historical sources themselves often aren't consistent about given names. Depending on the document, translation, or catalog, you can end up with different forms of the same first name (such as my example with Sauli, two different spellings!!), whereas the surname or territorial designation tends to be the more stable point of reference.
Rest assured, though, Jeanne-Rosalie Guillodon gets plenty of recognition in my personal projects. ^^
Hypothetically, how much legal trouble would I be in if i released my English Translation of Sergio Luzzattos Bonbon Robespierre? I feel a bit bad that I keep referencing it knowing most people don't have access to it or just cannot read italian/french: It feels a little unfair, and I didn't cram-translate it for just myself.. 😔
I've completely remade this blog on a different email because Tumblr was giving me way too much trouble with the sideblog.. which is exactly why I never made one in the first place, y'all.
But regardless! I think I'm gonna do it anyway (sharing the translation, I mean). I'm absolutely feral when it comes to sharing anything involving Augustin Robespierre. #sueme
Honestly, that's another reason I made this account on a new email. This account exists for one purpose and one purpose only: devoting myself to the younger Robespierre and, hopefully, getting more people to recognize his..
uh
checks notes
..masculine beauty, rivaled only by Hérault-Séchelles.
This is basically an entirely different person for an entirely different purpose. I am on a mission for AUGUSTIN. Not me.
Umm.
im going to repeat most of this information on my pinned soon. but yeah. thumbs up emoji
yall do me this favor
When/If i post my English Translation of Sergio Luzzattos Bonbon Robespierre should I :
Attach google doc link giving commentor permission
The most useful starting point isn't what Augustin felt about Maximilien — that's been covered — but what the structure of the relationship actually was, and what Maximilien gave back.
An Inherited Structure
The family dynamic was essentially set before either of them had much say in it. Their mother died when Augustin was eighteen months old: Maximilien was five and became, by Charlotte's account, the effective head of the family: "he spoke to us with a sort of imposing gravity; if he joined in our games, it was to direct them." The siblings were then separated — boys with maternal grandparents, girls with paternal aunts — and saw each other only on Sundays. By the time Augustin was old enough to have a relationship with Maximilien, Maximilien had already been cast as the authority figure, the one who directed and corrected.
This is the dynamic they carried into adulthood. Charlotte's memoirs describe both her and Maximilien reproaching Augustin for his idle tastes, exhorting him to work: Proyart — hostile source, i know, i know it's flagged,, this is me flagging it — describes Maximilien addressing a twenty-five-year-old Augustin as "stupid beast." Even accounting for Proyart's agenda, the underlying fact that Maximilien could have been believably seen to be scolding Augustin in something close to a parental register seems consistent with what Charlotte independently describes. It wasn't a relationship between peers, and it never had been.
Patronage and Direction
It's worth looking at the specific things Maximilien did in relation to Augustin, rather than what Augustin said about Maximilien.
He organized his election. Augustin failed to get into the Convention through Pas-de-Calais on his own merits. Maximilien largely controlled the Paris electoral assembly and Augustin was elected nineteenth out of twenty-four. His political career began as an act of nepotism by his brother.
He sent him on mission when he was becoming inconvenient — but the timing here matters and is often glossed over. The first mission to Nice in July 1793 was assigned before Augustin had developed any independent political line. The independence came from the missions, not before them. He spent five months watching the Terror actually operate: the federalist purges in Marseille, the summary executions at Toulon, the dechristianization campaign devastating local communities across the Midi and then the Haute-Saône. He came back to Paris in January 1794 with a formed, substantive position on all of this. That's when he became inconvenient. Young's "kite" image — the kite breaking from the hand and showing signs of floating away — applies specifically to the period after Nice, not before it.
Maximilien was not swayed by Augustin's anxieties. Young's phrase, and it applies repeatedly. Despite Augustin's emotional appeals about the dangers threatening Maximilien, about the damage Lebon was doing in the Pas-de-Calais, about what the Terror was actually producing in the departments — Maximilien calculated and waited. He used Augustin's emotional availability without being reciprocally vulnerable to it.
And when Augustin stepped out of line publicly, the correction was immediate.
The Limits of Independence
Augustin comes back from Toulon and five months in the Midi. He's spent that time, as we now know from the decree record, systematically releasing people arrested for attending the wrong mass, for refusing to attend constitutional priests, for "simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate." He has developed a specific, documented position: religious practice has been "isolated from the Revolution," and continuing to arrest people for it isn't vigilance, it's waste. He wrote this in his own administrative summaries and he said it to Maximilien in letters.
On January 5, he goes to the Jacobins and says it in public. The club is mid-flamewar between Hébert and Desmoulins, and Augustin calls out Hébert specifically, asking that he be heard on "the movements in the departments relating to worship" — the dechristianization campaign that had been making Augustin's missions so much harder to manage, and that he'd been opposing in decree after decree for weeks.
It is the most substantive position anyone takes that evening. It is also, at that specific political moment, the wrong move: Maximilien needed Hébert's support and was not ready to break with him publicly. So. The rebuke is immediate:
"It is easy to see that the last speaker has been absent from the Society for a long time. He has rendered great services at Toulon, but he did not sufficiently consider how dangerous it is to still fuel small passions which clash with so much violence."
Young: "it is possible that in his sharp retort he was influenced by the age-old distrust of the politician for the soldier who comes home from the war and makes embarrassing statements to the public press."
This is more specific than the usual "wrong timing, bad optics" reading. The man who'd spent five months watching dechristianization operate on the ground — who'd been releasing its victims in decree after decree — was publicly told he didn't understand the situation by the man who'd read about it in dispatches. Augustin had summarized his own position precisely in his administrative report from Franche-Comté: "il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" — "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized." He'd put it in writing and he'd sent the letters and importantly he'd been saying this for months.
And then Maximilien shut it down publicly in forty seconds.
After this, Augustin made no further speech at the Jacobins or the Convention. He went into society. He spent time with Monvoison and other questionable companions and retreated from political participation until he left on his next mission. What he didn't do was push back. He absorbed the public correction and went quiet. Young notes it's useless to speculate whether this was chance or anger. Either reading says something about the relationship — that he deferred even to public humiliation from Maximilien, or that the anger had nowhere to go but silence.
The Logic of Dependence: Why?
The psychological question — why the devotion took the form it did, specifically this form — is probably related to several things operating simultaneously.
One is the early structural dynamic: Maximilien was already the authority figure before Augustin was old enough to negotiate anything different. Deference to Maximilien wasn't a choice Augustin made; it was the water he swam in.
Another is the political dependency: Augustin's entire career was borrowed. He had no independent base, no independent reputation, no path to political significance that didn't run through his brother. The fan devotion and the political necessity were completely intertwined — to separate from Maximilien psychologically would have meant confronting that his political existence depended on Maximilien's goodwill.
But the one Young identifies that's most interesting is the shame at not being calumniated. At the Jacobins in October 1792, when Louvet publicly accused Maximilien, Augustin rushed to speak and in the middle of his speech said this: "I am ashamed to be speaking to you, because the brother of Robespierre should be calumniated, and he is not."
Being targeted meant significance. Being ignored meant oblivion. For someone who had lived in his brother's shadow his entire adult life, to be equally threatened would be — in a terrible way — a form of equivalence. The aspiration in "I swear to deserve it like you" is not just loyalty. It's the desire to be seen as equally significant. Young's reading: "it forces us to face the possibility that, just below the surface of Augustin's devotion, there was an envy of which he was probably never once conscious." He probably would have rejected this entirely. But the word he used was ashamed.
The Stairs at the Duplay House
A few days before Thermidor, Augustin arranges for recently liberated Arras patriots — Leblond, Viennot's allies, the local victims of Lebon's campaign — to brief Maximilien on Carnot. He has worked for weeks to get these people to Paris, specifically to help them. He tells Leblond to talk about Carnot, that Duquesnoy has evidence capable of guillotining Carnot fifteen times.
Leblond doesn't follow the script. He starts talking about the Duquesnoy brothers being despotic and brutal. Maximilien walks up and down, biting his nails. Then: "Let's go." He leaves. The meeting Augustin set up to help his friends from Arras has been redirected toward Maximilien's priority — building a case against Carnot — and when that priority isn't served, it's over.
On the stairs, Augustin turns on Leblond: "Foutue bête! There was only need to speak of Carnot. Why speak of Duquesnoy? My brother and the Committee have the greatest confidence in them. You're lucky to be free."
Two things are visible here at close range. Maximilien redirected the entire meeting away from the purpose Augustin had arranged it for — the Arras people, Buissart's crisis, Viennot's situation — toward his own political priority, and then ended it when that priority wasn't served. And Augustin, on the stairs, defers to Maximilien's framing completely: not "my brother didn't hear what you needed to say," but "you failed to deliver what my brother needed to hear." Even trying to help his own friends, he can't quite hold both things at once.
What Maximilien Gave Back
Access. Purpose. A political reason to exist. The opportunity to be useful to something larger than himself. This is not nothing. But it's also not equality. Maximilien accepted Augustin's total devotion as structurally appropriate and gave back, largely, the chance to keep demonstrating it.
What he didn't give back: protection from public correction. Genuine incorporation into decision-making. The kind of reciprocal emotional vulnerability that Augustin offered constantly. When Augustin's letters shook with anxiety for Maximilien's safety, Maximilien calculated his next move. When Augustin came back from the Midi with substantive conclusions about what the Terror was doing to France, Maximilien shut them down in forty seconds at the Jacobins. When Augustin arranged a meeting for the people of Arras who needed help, Maximilien used it for something else and left.
The relationship ended with Augustin demanding to share the arrest warrant and Maximilien having to take it (granted he was being screamed over at all angles but let me use this rhetorical move). He'd organized Augustin's political career and accepted his total loyalty for fifteen years. At the end, he accepted his death too.
TL;DR :
Augustin's devotion was reciprocal only in the sense that Maximilien gave him political purpose and opportunities; emotionally and intellectually, the relationship remained fundamentally hierarchical, with Maximilien treating Augustin as someone to direct rather than as an equal partner.
Sources:
anotherhumaninthisworlds compilation for easy searching — family dynamics post, primary sources cited therein including Charlotte's memoirs, Proyart (La vie et les crimes de Robespierre, 1795, hostile source), Maximilien at the Jacobins January 5 1794 (Jacobin club records), Augustin's correspondence via Michon.
Augustin's Précis des opérations faites par Robespierre jeune dans le département de la Haute-Saône, in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I, p. 260.
Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130. [Decree record]
Guffroy, Armand Joseph. Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices. 1795. pp. 336–337. (The Leblond/Carnot/stairs scene.)
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (The "kite" metaphor, January 5 analysis, "shame at not being calumniated" reading, chapters 2, 10, 19.)
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.
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Augustin Robespierre and Dechristianization: What the Sources Actually Show (Or, The Gospel According to Augustin.)
Hoh alright now this one took me a WHILE.. had to be a little.. hashtag rigorous..
One of the most documented but least discussed aspects of Augustin's time as representative on mission is his consistent, principled, and administratively consequential opposition to the dechristianization campaign. It shows up across three separate geographical contexts, in his own letters, in the actual decree record, and in independent corroboration from hostile witnesses who complained about it.
Let's go through it! Yeaaahhhhh!!! Wooooo!! Whoosss readdayyyy!!!
What Dechristianization Actually Was (Or, A Quick Catechism)
Very briefly, for context: from late 1793 onward, a wave of anti-religious violence swept through France, driven partly by Hébertist ideology and partly by representatives on mission who saw destroying Catholic practice as revolutionary duty.
This meant forced abdications of priests, churches converted into Temples of Reason, religious objects confiscated or destroyed, and people arrested for continuing to practice their faith or for preferring refractory (non-constitutional) priests over constitutional ones.
Bernard de Saintes, Augustin's most public opponent in the Haute-Saône, was actively encouraging this in the Doubs. Fouché was doing it in Lyon. Collot d'Herbois in the same region. It was, for a window in Year II, essentially official policy in practice even while Maximilien in Paris was publicly suspicious of it.
Speaking Heresy at the Jacobins
Augustin has just come back from Toulon and five months in the Midi. He goes to the Jacobins on January 5, 1794, and does something nobody was doing at that particular moment: he criticizes Hébert's dechristianization campaign directly and publicly.
His intervention is cut short — Maximilien immediately rebukes him, "he has rendered great services at Toulon but he did not sufficiently consider how dangerous it is to fuel small passions" — and Augustin falls silent. But the position is registered.
What's important here is the timing: The January 5 speech happens before his Franche-Comté mission, not after. He isn't carrying back a conclusion he reached from watching dechristianization operate in the provinces, but arriving in Paris with that conclusion already formed from his months in the Midi — and immediately, at the first opportunity, saying so out loud.
The Paper Trail to Salvation
This is the most concretely documented phase. The decrees published by Mathiez in the Annales révolutionnaires (1916) show a consistent, repeated pattern across the Haute-Saône in pluviôse Year II (roughly February 1794).
The Menoux decree is the most explicit. Fourteen people from the commune of Menoux had been arrested. Their sole stated offense: refusing to attend certain masses, or omitting to attend. Augustin's language in the decree is precise:
"considérant que la détention de tous les prévenus n'a eu pour cause que les refus ou l'omission d'aller à telle ou telle messe, que cette opinion est maintenant isolée de la Révolution" —
— "considering that the detention of all the accused has had no cause other than the refusal or omission to attend mass, that this opinion is now isolated from the Revolution."
They are released. The decree notes in passing that one of those freed has a son fighting in the Vendée.
The same formula appears repeatedly. Jean-Baptiste Theurey, cultivator of Cère-les-Noroy: arrested for refusing to attend mass, his name not appearing on the civic roll. Augustin's decree:
"considérant que les motifs de cette arrestation sont injustes et intolérants" —
— "considering that the motives of this arrest are unjust and intolerant."
He is released. Jeanne-Claude Thiebaud of Rupt: arrested for refusing to attend mass. Release decree:
"considérant que la détention n'a eu pour cause que le refus d'aller à la messe, considérant que cette opinion est isolée de la Révolution." —
— "Considering the detention resulted solely from the refusal to attend Mass, and considering this belief is unconnected with the Revolution."
Marie-Anne Euvrard: arrested for her religious opinions and for preferring refractory priests. Same formula, same release.
Jean-Antoine Boisson, cultivator of Bout: arrested for not liking constitutional priests. Augustin's decree:
"considérant que Jean-Antoine Boisson, cultivateur, paroît n'avoir été mis en arrestation que pour opinion religieuse et parce qu'il n'aimoit point les prêtres constitutionnels, cette opinion devant être isolée de la Révolution." —
— "Considering that Jean-Antoine Boisson, a farmer, appears to have been arrested only because of his religious beliefs and because he did not support the constitutional priests, and that this opinion ought to be regarded as separate from the Revolution."
And then the Gray mass release — decree XLVI in Mathiez's numbering — where a group of prisoners "arrested only for simple religious opinions which they did not seek to propagate" are freed collectively, with the reasoning:
"considérant que ces opinions sont isolées de la Révolution et que leur existence ne trouble point l'ordre public" —
— "these opinions are isolated from the Revolution and their existence does not disturb public order."
This group includes an ex-priest described as "more than eighty years old."
The formula is consistent enough across all these decrees to be clearly deliberate: "cette opinion est maintenant isolée de la Révolution" — this opinion is now isolated from the Revolution. He is explicitly arguing that religious practice, whatever its theological content, has ceased to be a political threat that requires suppression. The Revolution has moved past the point where Catholicism constitutes a counter-revolutionary danger. Persecuting people for it now isn't vigilance, it's waste.
Epistles of Saint Augustin
Running alongside the decree record are Augustin's letters to Maximilien during and after the Franche-Comté mission, now in the Michon Correspondance.
From Commune-Affranchie (Lyon), 3 ventôse Year II, writing about his mission and about Bernard's denunciation of him:
"Rien n'est plus facile que de conserver une réputation révolutionnaire aux dépens de l'innocence. Les hommes médiocres trouvent, dans ce moyen, le voile qui couvre toutes les noirceurs; mais l'homme probe sauve l'innocence aux dépens de sa réputation." —
— "Nothing is easier than maintaining a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence. Mediocre men find in this method the veil that covers all their villainy; but the honest man saves innocence at the expense of his reputation."
He is explicitly naming what the dechristianization arrests were, in many cases: careers built on denunciation of the harmless.
From Nice, 16 germinal Year II, writing about his Italian campaign:
"Les défenseurs de la patrie se sont parfaitement conduits; ils n'ont touché à aucune image dans un pays où le pinceau de la superstition a couvert toutes les murailles." —
— "The defenders of the fatherland have conducted themselves perfectly; they have not touched a single image in a country where the brush of superstition has covered every wall."
This is from a letter published in the Journal de la Montagne, communicated by Mathiez. It's not private correspondence. He wrote it for wider circulation, knowing what he was describing would be noted.
The context matters: the Ligurian valley Augustin had just passed through had been emptied of its civilian population. Forty thousand people had fled, convinced by émigré propaganda that the French would destroy their religion. His point is practical as much as principled — the dechristianization campaign was creating enemies where none needed to exist, handing a propaganda weapon to people who wished the Republic harm.
Your Honor, I'd Like to Call Bernard de Saintes
The most valuable corroboration, as always, comes from the people who were complaining about his approach rather than praising it.
Duroy, a relatively moderate Montagnard who passed through Vesoul in February, wrote immediately to Maximilien: "I noted with sorrow that your brother is no longer the same." The complaint was specifically about his clemency toward the religiously detained. He "spoke to him the language of friendship, frankness, and civic duty. But I saw that he did not understand." Duroy then left for another department because "my principles are incompatible with those he is manifesting." This is someone who thought releasing people arrested for religious practice was going too far in the moderate direction, confirming from the outside that Augustin's policy was real and consistently applied, not post-hoc reconstruction.
Bernard de Saintes publicly denounced him. Sylvain Lejeune followed. Both specifically attacked what they characterized as senseless clemency, and the decrees show that religious toleration was central to what they were denouncing.
Statistics Are Stubborn Things
For the Alpes-Maritimes, where Augustin spent far longer as representative on mission (two separate stints across the whole period from September 1793 through June 1794), the evidence is statistical rather than decree-by-decree. Luzzatto notes, drawing on departmental studies, that the Alpes-Maritimes was one of the few departments in the south-east that remained essentially untouched by dechristianization practices — including the forced abdication of priests, which was the most spectacular and aggressive element. Seven death sentences executed in Year II in the entire department. In the Haute-Saône, which Augustin administered for five weeks, the total of those condemned to death was zero.
Compare Lebon's Pas-de-Calais: 392 executions, with no significant federalist revolt to explain them. Compare the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Rhône under other representatives. The departmental death statistics are not the whole story — administration is more than execution counts — but they're a meaningful index of how a representative understood his mandate.
The Philosophy Behind the Policy
The Précis des opérations, Augustin's own administrative summary of his Franche-Comté mission — now in the Michon Correspondance, vol. I p. 260 — contains the clearest articulation of what he thought he was doing. The word "indulgence" does appear here, but in a narrow specific context: arguing that "the revolutionary government requires leniency toward secondary agents" who had overstepped. More important is the broader philosophical claim:
"il est donné à si peu d'hommes de sentir qu'on ne peut plus et qu'on ne doit plus révolutionner un pays révolutionné" —
— "it is given to so few men to feel that one can no longer and should no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized."
He is not arguing that religion is good, or that Catholicism deserves protection for its own sake, or that the Revolution was wrong to challenge the church. He is arguing that this particular moment has passed the point where anti-religious violence serves any revolutionary purpose. France has been revolutionized. The church has been disestablished and the confiscations are complete..
Continuing to arrest cultivators for attending the wrong mass, or releasing dogs named "le pape" into churches, or burning confessional boxes, doesn't advance the Republic — it manufactures enemies and hands ammunition to the Revolution's real adversaries.
It's a consequentialist argument, not a theological one. And it's an unusual one for its moment, because it requires someone who has actually seen what the Terror is producing in practice — which is exactly what Augustin had, and his brother hadn't.
(A Note on) Sources
Everything in this post rests on:
The decree record in Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130.
Augustin's letters in Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I. [the Commune-Affranchie letter and the Nice letter about religious images.]
Augustin's Précis des opérations, reproduced in Michon vol. I p. 260.
The Duroy letter, in Michon vol. I p. 250.
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Alpes-Maritimes statistics and context.)
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.
Nodier is not a source for this post. Everything above is either primary documents or secondary analysis based on archives. (I'm trying to stray away from using him as often)
(and, was he really "fond of the company of women" in the way that's come to mean what people think it means)
Wikipedia describes Augustin as "handsome, fond of good food, gaming and the company of women." This has passed through fandom like a game of telephone until it means something like: notorious womanizer, serial charmer, man who had several girlfriends including at least two confirmed and married ones. The truth, when you actually look at the sources, is more interesting and more specific than that — and also raises a question nobody seems to have asked: if Augustin was such a flagrant adulterer, why did none of his many post-Thermidor enemies ever actually say so?
Let's go through this properly.
The Important Women We Actually Know About, and What We Know
Charlotte Robespierre —
his sister, oldest sustained relationship in his life, currently the subject of three separate research spirals on this blog that I will get back to. Not elaborating here.
Élisabeth Duplay (later Lebas) —
the Duplay daughter he was warmest toward. He reportedly told her husband she was "cheerful and good" and that he liked her best of the sisters. She confirmed the origin of his nickname Bonbon in a note written around 1847, which suggests she held memories of him with some care. There is zero evidence of romantic feeling here and significant evidence of genuine sibling-like warmth in both directions. Not everything is romance.
The women of Vesoul and Besançon —
I keep mentioning this and I'll keep mentioning it because it matters. He invited the public to testify directly to him, including women, when deciding detainees' fates. Women petitioned him. The decree record is full of releases where the stated reasoning involves women specifically: pregnant prisoners, mothers of children, women whose only offense was religious practice. A child recognized him arriving in Vesoul and said "here comes someone to give us justice." Women filled his inn courtyard to petition him as he left Besançon. These are not romantic relationships. Moreso evidence of a man who genuinely registered women as people with legitimate claims on him — which in 1794 was not actually the default.
Marguerite Ricord —
Jean-François Ricord's wife, who traveled south with the mission. This is where things get genuinely complicated, so MAYBE let's be precise about what each source actually claims. Can you do that Joachim? Can we try? Yeah? Yeah! Alright.
Charlotte's memoirs: Marguerite made advances, Augustin resisted. This is Charlotte actively exonerating her brother. Her motive for doing so is obvious.
Barras's memoirs: Napoleon paid court to Marguerite specifically because she "exercised great influence" over Augustin. This is Barras, a man who had every reason to paint Augustin's circle as corrupt and importantly susceptible (to manipulation), and who notably stops at "influence" rather than alleging an affair outright.
Mary Youngs Biography: "Augustin had probably cuckolded him." Young is explicit that this is inference. The word "probably" is doing all the load-bearing work.
Now the main circumstantial evidence cited for an affair:
Allegedly, Augustin refused to see Charlotte during his December 1793 Paris stay and "lodged with his colleague Record" instead.
We have now looked at the primary source for this claim, which is Charlotte's 1835 memoir, and found two problems. First, Charlotte spells "Ricord" correctly every single time she mentions him and his wife throughout the memoir — dozens of instances: Now, In the specific December 1793 lodging claim, she writes "Record." Not "Ricord." One anomalous spelling against a background of consistent correct usage.
Second, Mary Young states elsewhere in her biography, debunking a different anecdote entirely, that Ricord and Augustin were never in Paris at the same time after they left together in July 1793. Notably one may find that Ricord's signature continues to appear on Toulon decrees during the period in question.
Third, Charlotte herself, in a conversation with Gaillard in May 1794 recorded in his memoir, says: "when my younger brother passed through Melun, we were all three living together" — directly contradicting her own memoir's account of him refusing to enter the house.
So
the primary piece of circumstantial evidence for the affair doesn't hold up on examination.
The Nice rupture itself — something clearly happened between Charlotte and Augustin during the mission — is real and documented. But "something happened" doesn't resolve to "affair" on the available evidence once you remove the detail that was pulling the most weight.
What does the evidence actually support for Marguerite Ricord? That she had influence over him. That Charlotte disliked her intensely and found the dynamic inappropriate. That Barras found the dynamic politically useful to weaponize. That Augustin was willing to let a colleague's wife shape his administrative approach in ways that made other Montagnards uncomfortable. Whether this was romantic, collegial, or something else: genuinely unknown..
Guillodon de La Saudraye —
the ex-marchioness who accompanied Augustin through the Franche-Comté mission. This is the relationship we have the most on, and it's the one where "mistress" language appears in a relatively contemporary source. Lods (1888), drawing on archival material, calls her explicitly "sa maîtresse" — his mistress — and states she had "the greatest influence" over him, that "he took no important measure without consulting her advice, and often she counseled him toward clemency."
This is the strongest case for an actual intimate relationship. We have:
A near-contemporary scholar using mistress language from archival sources
A contemporary administrative letter (Boizot to La Saudraye, 21 March 1794, Archives Nationales) acknowledging that she has "irresistible power" over Augustin and asking her to use it to prevent Bernard's return
She attended Jacobin club meetings with him and gave a speech that was printed alongside his
She was invited to meet Maximilien as a political informant, in Augustin's own letter to his brother
People seeking rehabilitation wrote to her directly rather than to Augustin
What's also notable: after Thermidor, she apparently did use whatever influence and connections she had on behalf of the Vesoul patriots. Lods specifically notes that following her departure from Franche-Comté, Boizot reached out to her and "thanks to her efforts, Bernard was recalled to Paris." A woman being instrumentalized by a man and then discarded when convenient doesn't typically go on to advocate for his political clients after his death.
Whatever the relationship was, it had something real in it
Nodier (twelve years old at the time, writing forty years later) adds a physical description that he himself flags as possibly contaminated by literary imagination: "something penetrating, caustic, and almost infernal in her gaze and smile." He also records that the room couldn't entirely believe she was his mistress, given how ascetic Augustin's whole bearing seemed to exclude the idea of romantic attachment. This is, again, the twelve-year-old, but it's worth noting that even the contemporary room was uncertain about what exactly the relationship was.
The Dog That Didn't Bark: Why No Adultery Accusation?
Here's the question I find most interesting.. Augustin after Thermidor was one of the most undefended targets available. His enemies threw everything they had: Dumont accused him of financial corruption and converting army funds into gold ingots with no evidence. The British press called him a cannibal. Baudot called him a fool and a. (get this). jar. Le Blond called him without brains, talent, or character. None of these people felt they needed actual evidence for any of it.
And yet: nobody went after him for adultery.
Not Barras in his initial denunciations. Not Fréron. Not the post-Thermidor pamphlets. Not the British press that was happy to invent cannibalism. Not Courtois in his forensic inventory of the Robespierre papers.
Why not?
A few possibilities:
The most boring: maybe it just wasn't particularly scandalous? Representatives on mission traveling with women they weren't married to was, per the historical record, genuinely common. Prieur de la Côte-d'Or cohabited with a woman still legally married to someone else (much similarly to bonbon!!). The France of Year II was not operating on Ancien Régime moral conventions. If everyone was doing some version of it, there's less leverage in the accusation.
The more interesting: maybe it didn't exist in a form that was documentably accusable. The specific post-Thermidor propaganda charges against Augustin were about financial corruption and political conspiracy — things where fabricated evidence could be constructed and presented. Sexual accusation worked differently: it required witnesses, testimony, some kind of specificity.. If the actual nature of his relationships with Marguerite Ricord and La Saudraye was politically useful influence rather than straightforwardly legible adultery, it might have been harder to weaponize.
Additionally.. If Augustin had indeed been accused of sleeping with Mme. Ricord, that accusation would also have implicated Deputy Ricord and his own reputation by making him look like a cuckold whose wife was involved with the man he later denounced. Since Ricord was being used as a credible witness against Augustin and his character after Thermidor, there was little advantage in tarnishing his own reputation.
Or: maybe the weapons chosen (fool, corrupt, nobody's puppet) were simply more effective for discrediting a man whose political identity was "devoted younger brother." Undermining his intelligence and independence simply did more damage than undermining his virtue.
So Was He "Fond of the Company of Women"
Yes, genuinely, in a specific way: he seems to have extended to women something closer to full political and intellectual personhood than most of his contemporaries did in practice. He sent La Saudraye to brief Maximilien as a political intelligence source. He credited women petitioners as valid witnesses to local conditions. He released women detained on thin pretexts while his colleagues were building careers on denunciation. The Besançon crowds weeping as his carriage left were not generic gratitude — many of them were women whose family members he'd freed.
Whether this also meant he was sexually attracted to, romantically involved with, or physically intimate with any or all of the women around him: genuinely, partially, unknowably unclear.. La Saudraye — probably something real there, Lods says mistress and he had access to archives I don't. Marguerite Ricord — possible, but the primary evidence for it has mostly fallen apart under scrutiny. Everyone else — warm friendships and political warmth that keep getting read as romance because the assumption is that a man who enjoyed women's company must have been sleeping with them.
The Wikipedia characterization isn't wrong exactly. But "fond of the company of women" doing the work of "notorious womanizer with multiple married girlfriends" in fandom requires a lot of inference that the primary sources don't cleanly support once you actually read them.
Sources:
Lods, A. Un Conventionnel en Mission: Bernard de Saintes. Paris: Fischbacher, 1888. (pp. 50-51 for the Besançon scene and La Saudraye; pp. 70-74 for the Boizot letter; p. 74 for the aftermath.)
Boizot to La Saudraye, 1 Germinal An II [21 March 1794]. Archives Nationales F7, communicated via Lods.
Robespierre, Charlotte. Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères. Paris, 1835. (The "Record" spelling anomaly confirmed from original text; Laponneraye's footnote confirmed.)
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011.
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025.
Gaillard, Maurice André. La Révolution, la Terreur, le Directoire 1791–1799: d'après les mémoires de Gaillard. 1908. p. 263. (Charlotte's own statement that they were "all three living together" when Augustin passed through Melun.)
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. Vol. I — Augustin's letter asking Maximilien to receive La Saudraye.
Mémoires de Barras, membre du Directoire. 1895. Vol. I, pp. 148–149. (Napoleon and Marguerite Ricord.)
Untangling "Moderate": What Bonbon's Moderatism Actually Was
ok so. I promise more of the Charlotte/family drama deep dive is still coming, I am simply marinating in primary sources at the moment and need a palate cleanser before I subject myself to more of that headache. But something clicked for me recently while reading about Lafayette of all people, and I think it's worth a quick detour before we go back to the sibling trenches..
Here's the thing that got me: Lafayette is constantly described as a "moderate." Augustin is constantly described as a "moderate." And yet these two men are about as politically opposite as it is possible to be within the same six-year window of French history.
Lafayette ends up fleeing the country in 1792; having effectively becoming an 'enemy of the Republic', and getting declared a traitor by the Convention. Augustin is a hardline Montagnard who helped purge the Girondins, signed off on reprisal executions at Toulon, and died voluntarily alongside Robespierre rather than disavow him.
So clearly "moderate" cannot mean one single thing here. The word is doing a lot of unexamined work, and I think it's worth actually taking it apart.
Lafayette's moderation, briefly
Lafayette's moderation is moderation relative to the revolutionary trajectory itself. He wanted a constitutional monarchy, a managed transition, the Revolution stopped at roughly the point where it had already inconvenienced him personally (sorry Lafayette it's true/j). When the Revolution radicalized past that point — when the monarchy fell, when the Republic was declared, when the Terror began — his position essentially no longer aligned with the direction of events (or rather no longer aligned with the political structure that emerged). He did not adapt to the new political structure, and instead moved into opposition from outside it. This culminated in his attempt to resist revolutionary forces militarily and his eventual flight from France after being declared a traitor, when remaining in place would likely have meant arrest and execution. His moderation is a brake applied from above, by someone who fundamentally distrusted where popular sovereignty was heading.
In that sense, his “moderation” functions less as balance within the Revolution and more as a limit placed on it from an earlier political horizon — an unwillingness to follow its logic past a certain point.
This is moderation as retreat from the project.
Augustin's moderation, by contrast
Augustin's moderation was never retreat. He never stopped being a Jacobin. He never stopped believing in the Mountain, in the Republic, in the legitimacy of revolutionary government as an institution: He helped purge the Girondins in 1793. He pointed a pistol at a colleague during that purge, by his own admission. He was present and complicit at the height of the Toulon reprisals, signing orders alongside Barras and Fréron without, as far as the record shows, much hesitation in the moment.
What changed wasn't his commitment to the Revolution. What changed was his read on whether the machinery of the Terror — as actually practiced, in the actual provinces, by actual representatives on mission — was serving that Revolution or destroying it from the inside.
His own language on this is unusually precise for a man who didn't otherwise write like a theorist. He arrived at something close to a formula: that a country which had already been revolutionized could not, and should not, continue to be revolutionized — that endlessly re-applying the Terror past the point of necessity wasn't vigilance, but instead self-sabotage. And he was explicit about the mechanism by which this happened: that nothing was easier than maintaining a reputation for revolutionary zeal at the direct expense of someone else's innocence. He'd watched representatives build careers on denunciation, watched local committees use "counter-revolutionary suspicion" as a vehicle for settling personal scores, watched the whole apparatus of revolutionary justice get hijacked by people who had no actual interest in justice.
So his response, once given administrative authority in the Haute-Saône, wasn't to soften the Revolution's goals. It was to apply something closer to due process within them: investigate whether a denunciation traced back to personal grudge (haine) rather than real counter-revolutionary activity; release the elderly, the pregnant, the economically essential; restore freedom of worship on the grounds that persecuting harmless religious practice wasn't protecting the Republic, it was manufacturing enemies where none previously existed. And, crucially, this came paired with real institutional rigor in the other direction — he annulled a corrupt sale of state property in Nice, arrested his own agents for abusing their authority, pursued anti-corruption measures with the same energy he applied to releasing prisoners. This wasn't generalized leniency buuut a man trying to make the revolutionary government actually function as the thing it claimed to be, rather than as a vehicle for local score-settling and careerism.
This is moderation as internal correction. A believer trying to save the project from the people claiming to defend it most zealously.
The Danton problem
"Isn't this just Dantonism?"
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, because Augustin wasn't the only one moving in this rhetorical direction. Danton and the so-called Indulgents had been making a structurally similar argument months earlier — that the Terror had outlived its greatest necessity, and that mercy and de-escalation had become the patriotic course.
Augustin arrives at a related conclusion from a different angle. In his own administrative summary of the Haute-Saône mission, he argues that one "cannot and must not revolutionize a country already revolutionized." That's a remarkably concise statement of the principle running through his mission: not that revolutionary government should abandon its objectives, but that continuing to apply emergency measures indiscriminately after the emergency had changed risked undermining the Republic itself.
The word "indulgence" does appear in connection with his mission from Augustins own words, though more narrowly than as a "watchword". In the Précis it is used in an administrative context — arguing for leniency toward secondary agents in a specific case — and later accounts associate him more broadly with the language of indulgence. That still creates an intriguing parallel with Danton, whose political language had become inseparable from the word only months earlier, but the stronger evidence lies in Augustin's administrative practice and in his own formulation that a country already revolutionized should not be endlessly revolutionized.
The mention of indulgence, however, makes the apparent parallel difficult to ignore, even if the evidence is stronger in his administrative practice. The irony is striking, as "indulgence" was the very language that, only months earlier — by his own brother's hand — would cost Danton his head.
The difference in outcome wasn't simply about the substance of the argument. It was also about what that argument became associated with politically. Danton's calls for indulgence became entangled — fairly or unfairly — with allegations of corruption and with suspicion that he was challenging the legitimacy of revolutionary government's emergency structures. Augustin's moderation, by contrast, remained narrowly administrative. He never challenged the authority of the Committee of Public Safety or rejected revolutionary government as an institution, and his efforts at restraint were framed as attempts to make its machinery function more justly rather than to dismantle it. Similar impulses toward de-escalation therefore carried very different political meanings depending on who articulated them, when, and in what institutional context.
The retroactive moderates
And then there's a third category worth flagging, which is the moderation that only shows up after the fact. Carnot is the clean example — The Desk-Chair General who, by his own later self-presentation, was 'always quietly horrified by the Terror's excesses', except this horror only becomes documented and vocal once the Robespierres are safely dead and he needs to explain why he wasn't implicated. This performance by The Paper-Pushing Patriot is moderation as alibi, constructed after the political wind changed, and it's genuinely difficult to distinguish from the contemporaneous, documented version Augustin was practicing in real time, with real administrative and social consequences, while the Terror was still very much ongoing and very much dangerous to be seen restraining.
So, in short
When people call Augustin a moderate, I think it needs a footnote every time: moderate in application, not moderate in conviction. He wasn't a Lafayette, trying to put the brakes on the Revolution from outside it. He was closer to a true believer who'd watched the machinery of his own cause start eating people for sport, and decided that saving the Revolution meant restraining the very instrument — the Terror — that he'd helped build and was still, in other contexts, willing to use.
It is a genuinely strange position to hold, and an even stranger one to die for.
Anyway. Back to untangling Charlotte soon, I promise, once I've. recovered.
(this is less a quotes compilation and more an attempt to read the self-image underneath the quotes)
The problem with asking how Augustin viewed himself is that most of his self-referential moments are threaded through Maximilien. You pull at one thread and you find the other: But if you're patient about it, a picture does emerge — and it's more complicated than either the devoted younger brother or the charming bon vivant.
I. The Man Who Defined Himself Through His Brother's Fate
The earliest version of this is from 1790, years before any of the events that made it famous:
"I cannot hide my fears from you, dear brother, you will seal the cause of the people with your blood, perhaps even these people will be so unfortunate as to strike you, but I swear to avenge your death and to deserve it like you."
Augustin here was a whopping twenty-six years of age, and Maximilien wasn't yet famous: The guillotine hadn't been invented yet as an instrument of the Terror. And Augustin was already writing about avenging his brother's death and deserving the same fate.. "Deserve it like you" is the phrase that catches me — not just that he'd share the danger but that he'd earn it. That he'd be worthy of the same end.
This thread runs all the way to 1794. At the Jacobins on July 11, sixteen days before Thermidor:
"In vain would they try to separate me from him: as long as he remains the proclaimer of morality and the terror of villains, I aspire to no other glory than that of sharing the grave with him."
And then the Convention declaration on July 27:
"I am as guilty as my brother: I share his virtues; I want to share his fate."
And then the medical deposition, hours before his death, still defining himself in terms of Maximilien: That he never stopped doing his duty well at the Convention, like his brother.
Even dying, with a shattered pelvis and a brain bleed, the frame of reference is: like his brother. His final political testimony named Carnot as a conspirator and defended both of them in the same breath.
If there was any doubt, it becomes clear here that this is not performance; the consistency across a decade is too complete for performance (or atleast a performance NOT grounded in genuine conviction.. The repeated declarations are probably both authentic and rhetorical at the same time). One quote can be rhetoric. Two can be coincidence. A decade of repetition becomes self-concept. He genuinely understood his own life as running parallel to Maximilien's — and his own significance as deriving from that parallel.
II. The Almost-Great-Man: He Said, Modestly
But there's another register, and it's much funnier!!
I promise!!
No bone breaking required!!
After his speech of April 20, 1793 — the one that helped set the stage for the Girondin purge — he wrote to Buissart:
"Since Saturday I am almost a great man, I receive congratulations from all sides for my speech in favor of the Municipality of Paris, in support of measures denounced by a leader of the faction. Do not be surprised then if I put on airs, the incense actually risks suffocating me, if you do not come and dissipate the fumes that are going to my head."
Aw Shucks, Another Triumph! The self-irony is from The People's Princess over here doesn't make it any better. He's mocking himself for being flattered. But he also wrote it down and sent it, which means he wanted Buissart to know he'd done something worth mocking himself about. The modesty and the pride are operating simultaneously..
The Toulon letter does the same thing. After the fall of Fort Balaguier:
"I am astonished to be a hero. They assure me I am one, though I wasn't thinking about it at all. I was in the ranks; during the action I saw neither bullets, nor cannonballs, nor bombs; I only saw the small fort that had to be taken. To the fort! It is ours, let's go, courage, my friends! I reached its base without even realizing it."
This is charming and probably mostly genuine — but it's also extremely aware of how charming it is. The man who wrote "I am astonished to be a hero" knew exactly what kind of letter he was writing: Astonished to Be a Hero, Delighted to Report It ( ˶ ͡°ヮ ͡°) !!
III. Local Man Understands Revolution Better Than Revolution
This is the self-image I find most interesting, and the one that gets least attention. From Aix-en-Provence, August 1793, writing to Maximilien:
"You do not know the situation of these unhappy regions well. Heads are overheated, incapable of reasoning."
Here, he's twenty-nine, writing to the de facto head of the Committee of Public Safety, telling him he doesn't understand what's actually happening in France. And he's right! But the confidence, brother or not, is rather remarkable.
From Franche-Comté, February 1794, after releasing hundreds of prisoners:
"Rest assured that I have made the Mountain adored, while there are still areas that only fear it, that do not know it, and that only lack a representative worthy of his mission, who educates the people instead of demoralizing them."
(you can sense the living embodiment of the tiktok proud emoji in his words, but ok)
From Lyon, same month, defending his actions against criticism from fellow Montagnards:
"It is given to so few to feel that one cannot and must no longer revolutionize a country that has been revolutionized."
And perhaps the most striking of all, from a letter to Maximilien about provincial conditions:
"Nothing is easier than preserving a revolutionary reputation at the expense of innocence."
This is clear-eyed to the point of being almost brutal. He saw exactly how the Terror was functioning as a reputation machine, and he said it plainly: He seems genuinely to have believed that he was one of the few people who understood this — that his months on the road had given him access to truths that the Paris revolutionaries, including his brother, couldn't access from inside their committees.
He wasn't wrong about this: The tragedy is that being right (and incredibly handsome) didn't really translate into power.
IV. The Unconscious Competitor
Strap in.
This is Mary Young's reading, and I think she's right, and I also think Augustin would have found it completely incomprehensible:
October 29, 1792. Louvet has just accused Maximilien in the Convention, the first serious open attack on him. Augustin rushes to the Jacobins, agitated, his speech confused and jumping from point to point. And in the middle of all of it, he says:
"I am ashamed to be speaking to you, because the brother of Robespierre should be calumniated and he is not."
Young's commentary goes as follows: "It is an interesting statement because it forces us to face the possibility that, just below the surface of Augustin's devotion, there was an envy of which he was probably never once conscious. To be threatened, libelled and become, possibly, the target of murderers means fame; to be ignored means oblivion. I do not for a moment think that Augustin would have accepted my interpretation of his words. He might well have said that he wanted to be seen to be as good a Republican as his brother, one equally ready to die for liberty."
And I agree he would have said exactly that, in fact, I couldn't put my interpretation to any better words. The 1790 letter proves it: "I swear to avenge your death and to deserve it like you." The desire to deserve the same fate. Not to be Maximilien, but to be worthy of standing next to him. To be equally threatened, equally in danger, equally significant. If Maximilien bears the burden alone, then Augustin feels he has not yet paid the same price: If calumny is the tax paid by virtue, then not being calumniated may imply one has not yet proven oneself sufficiently.
But the word he used was ashamed. Not proud of his brother, not indignant on his behalf — ashamed for himself. Ashamed that he was not the target..
The desire to deserve the same fate and the shame at not yet having it are not the same as envy. But they're not entirely separate either..
The three motives in Augustin's choice of wording stick out when one chooses to inspect them.. Envy of prominence, desire for equal sacrifice, and republican honor culture; I suspect all three motives may coexist. As human motives usually do. It is difficult when, even in a time where things are much bigger than oneself — to not feel personally implicated, and assessed on your worth:
If Maximilien is attacked and I am not, what does that say about me?
Have I done enough?
Have I sacrificed enough?
Am I actually as committed as he is?
Am I worthy of standing beside him?
In that reading, the shame comes less from wanting Maximilien's fame than from fearing that the difference between them might be deserved. Whether Augustin experienced the feeling as a problem of worthiness, or, as Young interprets it, as a problem of recognition, isn't the question when it could very easily be both at once..
I don't believe Augustin consciously wanted Maximilien's place (especially as he repeatedly places himself parallel or even beneath him). But I do think he desperately wanted the same moral significance.
If Augustin had said:
"I wish I were calumniated too,"
that would suggest ambition. But he says:
"I am ashamed."
Shame is a peculiar emotion. You feel shame when a situation seems to reveal something about your worth: If I fail an exam, I might feel disappointed. If I believe the failure reveals that I'm stupid, I feel ashamed. Shame is almost always connected to self-evaluation. So 'If Maximilien is receiving the attacks reserved for important revolutionaries and I am not, what does that say about my own commitment?' Ambition says: Why don't people notice me? While shame says: Why haven't I earned what he has earned?
A revolutionary imposter syndrome, and a hidden syllogism: Maximilien is attacked because he serves the Republic. I serve the Republic too.
Why am I not attacked? Because If the enemies of the Revolution hate you, you must be doing something right..
Where Young becomes more provocative is in suggesting that Augustin may not have fully understood the nature of his own feelings. This is not an impossible reading. Consider the structure of his devotion: he repeatedly expresses desires such as wanting to share Maximilien's fate, share his grave, and share in his virtues.
On the surface, these declarations appear wholly self-sacrificing. Yet psychologically there may be another dimension at work. Every one of these statements, while framed as acts of devotion, also serves to keep Augustin alongside Maximilien. The relationship remains the central axis of his identity and self-definition.
In that sense, even self-sacrifice can function as a means of preserving proximity. The underlying impulse may not be, "Let me become greater than him," but rather, "Do not separate our stories, and do not leave me behind."
If so, the dynamic is not one of competition for dominance, but of competition for significance — the struggle to ensure that one's life remains inseparable from the life that gives it meaning.
Basically.. Augustin's devotion to Maximilien was genuine. But because he measured his own worth against Maximilien, every attack on his brother became, indirectly, a measure of himself. He wanted not merely to share Maximilien's cause, but to prove that he deserved to share its costs. The resulting feeling contains traces of envy, ambition, loyalty, insecurity, and republican ideals all at once.
In practice, Augustin was not merely an extension of his brother: But in his self-conception, he repeatedly returned to the role of companion, defender, witness, and fellow martyr.
There is almost a tension between the man he was and the man he imagined himself to be:
The man who was an influential representative-on-mission, independent political actor, regional power broker, and experienced revolutionary administrator.
Versus his self concept as the one standing beside Maximilien.
I'm rambling so i'm ending this section.. whistles
What He Would Have Said
If you'd asked Augustin how he viewed himself, I think he would have thought something like (in his deep, dreamy, saucy and stoic voice): I am a man who saw the Revolution clearly, who tried to make it humane, who was loyal to his brother and to the people without sacrificing one for the other, and who chose to share his brother's fate when the moment came..
And it's interesting, because Augustin himself often linked his identity own to Maximilien. That's not merely something historians imposed on him..
He probably wouldn't have mentioned the shame at not being calumniated: He wouldn't have framed the grave-sharing as the central aspiration of his adult life, even though the letters show it was. He wouldn't have acknowledged that his confidence in his own clear vision sometimes shaded into a belief that he alone understood — while the man he defined himself against, the one he swore to deserve, was in the next room making the decisions.
He was more self-aware than most people give him credit for. He was less self-aware than he thought he was. That gap between the two is where most of the interesting things about him live.
Sources:
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. 2 vols. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926. (Letters directly consulted in the 1926 edition.)
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (The "I am ashamed" analysis, chapters 7–8.)
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano. Translated by me, 2025. Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009. (Toulon letter, Franche-Comté letters, July 11 Jacobins speech.)
Augustin at the Jacobins, October 29 1792. Cited in Young, chapter 7.
Augustin at the Jacobins, July 11 1794. Recorded in Mercure français, no. 32 (July 18).
Augustin at the Convention, July 27 1794. Reported in Le Moniteur Universel, no. 311 (July 29).
Medical report on Augustin, July 28 1794, written at the civil committee of the city hall section.
Augustin Robespierre Regarding the Women Around Him (or: the man who valued women's opinions as long as it didn't cost him anything)
Something I keep coming back to is the gap between how Augustin treated women in the abstract and how he handled them in his actual personal life: Because those are two genuinely different things, and both are documented, and neither fully cancels out the other.
What He Was Capable Of: The Mercy He Extended to Strangers
(or, The Ladies' Man and the Jacobin Jam)
Heh.. Not to uhm,. toot my own horn or anything but.. toot tooottt.. The decree timeline is a useful starting point.. He freed pregnant prisoners: "Citoyenne Delisle: Freed because she is pregnant and has 5 small children." He released women arrested for "simple religious opinions that have never disturbed public order." He freed a man specifically because his sister was blind and depended on him entirely — asking, in his own words, "is he guilty for listening to the voice of nature and holding out his hand to his brother whom he saw thus dying without means of support?" He granted a pension to Widow Barbot. He freed women arrested on the word of jealous neighbors, women whose only crime was wearing a cross.
When women came to him as petitioners — with documented need, with pleas, and with petitions — he almost always listened. The women of Besançon crowded around his carriage as he left, weeping. The women of Vesoul filled the inn courtyard waiting to present petitions as he prepared to depart. "I will come back," he told them, "with an olive branch or I will die."
You could very well say, given the decrees and all, that the warmth was genuine.
And then there's the Besançon Jacobin club.
The La Saudraye Paradox
Augustin brought La Saudraye to the meeting: One would find he'd apparently been bringing her everywhere — to Jacobin club sessions in Vesoul, into daily policy discussions, and into the administrative work of the mission. Suspects had learned to petition her directly, knowing that going to her was going to him. He wrote to Maximilien asking him to receive her and hear what she had to say: "necessary information to come to know certain characters who play a role in the Revolution." He explicitly trusted her political judgment enough to send her to his brother as an emissary.
At Besançon, a tinsmith who was a Bernard de Saintes loyalist stood up immediately as Augustin mounted the tribune, before Augustin even had a chance to establish himself in the room at all:
"Citizens, the regulations of our club prohibit the entry of women. I am married and a father, but I have never dreamed of bringing either my wife or my daughter here. Robespierre, neither husband nor father, has brought his woman here. I ask that she be made to leave, and I ask that it be noted in the minutes that at least one Republican has protested against Robespierre's aristocracy."
Augustin was furious. He signaled to her to leave, and she walked out.
Nodier records that as she crossed the room every eye followed her. He claimed to find her neither beautiful nor even pretty, yet her face nevertheless made a powerful impression on him: there was, he wrote, something penetrating, caustic, almost infernal in both her smile and her gaze. He also repeated the rumor circulating among those present — that she possessed an almost supernatural ability to read souls, and that Augustin had brought her with him as part of a "mystery of redemption," charged with distinguishing the good from the bad. The rumor was absurd, but its existence is revealing. Her presence in political spaces had become conspicuous enough that people felt compelled to invent explanations for it..
And here's where it gets interesting, because we know from Nodier's (dubious as is) account exactly what Augustin was capable of when he actually wanted to fight. That same evening, at that same meeting, he gave a long caustic speech about Bernard de Saintes that Nodier describes as "delivered with a terrifying calm — I was about to say a cruel one." He mocked Bernard's thinness, his smallness, his very physical existence. He said he believed "someone of that name had slipped into the National Convention through the keyhole." He said "narrow and light as Bernard's head may be, mine will weigh no more than his in the scales of justice." He descended from the tribune "amid fresh bursts of laughter and new acclamations, crossed the hall, rejoined his companion, and went to his post chaise."
He rejoined the woman he had just allowed to be expelled.
He was not a man who backed down from confrontation in general. That night he did it deliberately and skillfully and to considerable applause. He chose, specifically, not to fight for her.
The contradiction became even starker moments later, as this is where, according to Nodier, the courtyard outside the inn was crowded with women who had been waiting impatiently to present petitions to him. He could do little for them — his mission technically ended at the departmental border — but he addressed them anyway, promising that he would return with an olive branch or die for them: Women he had never met received a public declaration of devotion from him almost immediately after the woman he trusted enough to carry political intelligence to Maximilien Robespierre had been left to walk out of the Jacobin club alone.
Luzzatto reads the club scene as "proof that the Revolution of men did not always correspond, or did not correspond at all, to a Revolution of women." Which is accurate but also slightly lets Augustin off the hook — it frames it as a general structural failure rather than a specific choice he made. He trusted her observations enough to route them to Maximilien, but he did not trust that trust publicly when defending it would cost him something.
Robespierre enters → mounts the tribune → tinsmith immediately speaks up before he's even said anything → La Saudraye is expelled → "le tumulte s'apaisa" (the tumult calmed) → Robespierre gives his speech (general points first, then Bernard mockery) → president tries to intervene with the "illustration d'une famille" remark → Robespierre attacks both Bernard AND the president → famous tinsmith line → descends, rejoins La Saudraye, carriage → women with petitions at the inn courtyard → "rameau d'or" speech → carriage departs.
The Charlotte/Marguerite Triangle, or: How to Avoid a Problem Using Other People
!!! ohohohoh ain't this what we were all waiting for!!! Everybody knows the horseback ride incident is where the pattern gets explicit.
Charlotte's version: Marguerite suggested the ride. Charlotte reluctantly went. Augustin reproached Charlotte. Charlotte called on Marguerite to testify. Marguerite said it was Charlotte's idea and she'd been taken against her will. Augustin believed Marguerite.
Charlotte: "My brother knew I was incapable of lying. Why then did he not want to believe me?"
We don't actually know whose version is accurate and historians have gone back and forth on it. That's almost beside the point. What's interesting is the mechanism: Augustin accepted one woman's word over another's without investigating, without confronting either of them directly, and importantly without sitting Charlotte down and asking her to explain. He decided — unilaterally — and then acted on the decision by withdrawing rather than engaging.
When he came back to Paris in December 1793, he lodged with the Ricords rather than seeing Charlotte. He used Marguerite's household as a physical reason not to have the confrontation. Charlotte was in the city and he very well consciously chose to sleep somewhere that made seeing her logistically implausible.
Then in spring 1794 he wrote to Maximilien:
"My sister does not have a single drop of blood that resembles ours. I have seen and learned so much about her that I regard her as our greatest enemy. She abuses our spotless reputation to lay down the law on us and threatens to take a scandalous step in order to compromise us. We must take a decisive stand against her. We must make her leave for Arras."
He escalated directly to the maximum available authority rather than having a direct conversation. Charlotte didn't know what she was supposed to have done: He went from silent withdrawal to writing to Maximilien asking to have her removed from the city — without, apparently, telling Charlotte herself what the problem was.
Even if Charlotte were entirely wrong about the ride, Augustin still:
avoided her,
stayed elsewhere,
complained to Maximilien,
sought her removal,
never answered the final letter.
The behavioral pattern survives regardless of who won the original dispute.
Napoleon cultivated Marguerite Ricord specifically because, per Barras's memoirs, she exercised great influence over Augustin. This was apparently visible enough from the outside that a man calculating his career moves concluded that going through her was a viable route to Augustin. Which tells you something about how legible the pattern was even to people who barely knew him, even if Barras isn't the best source here..
Return to Sender: Neither Snow nor Rain nor Sisterly Devotion: The Most Frictionless Goodbye
On July 6, 1794, Charlotte wrote to him:
"Your aversion for me, my brother, far from diminishing, as I flattered myself, has become the most implacable hatred, to the point that the mere sight of me inspires horror to you; also, I must not hope that you will ever be calm enough to listen to me, which is why I will attempt to write to you."
She wrote because she had already given up on him being willing to hear her directly. She was doing the emotional labor of finding the medium he might tolerate — a letter he could read without having to respond in real time, without having to face her. She acknowledged the money dispute. She said she would leave. She said she would forgive him. She said wherever she ended up, even across the seas, if he needed her she would come back immediately.
He didn't respond. And they never spoke again.
What gets me about this is that Charlotte's letter already shows she'd internalized his avoidance. She wasn't demanding a confrontation — she was offering him the most frictionless version of contact she could construct. She'd already adapted her approach to his pattern.
He still didn't answer.
What Pattern Is This, Actually
It's not that he didn't value women or thought them unimportant. The decree timeline argues against that. His trust in La Saudraye's political intelligence, his warmth toward Élisabeth Duplay, the Vesoul women weeping as his carriage drove away — all of that argues against it.
The pattern is more specific. Women who needed something from him — who came to him as petitioners, who needed mercy or justice or advocacy — got his full attention and usually got what they needed. Women who complicated his life — who witnessed things he'd rather not have witnessed (Charlotte watching the Ricord situation), who challenged his public self-presentation (La Saudraye's presence as an accusation of "aristocracy"), who asked him to account for himself (Charlotte's letter) — got avoidance, deflection, or escalation to a higher authority.
He was comfortable dispensing justice to strangers. He was not comfortable being accountable to people he was close to.
My "Not So Sweet Bonbon" post calls this emotional outsourcing, which is right. I'd add that it's not really passive. The Besançon speech is proof he could fight when he wanted to. He chose not to extend that capability to the women in his personal life. He slandered Charlotte to Maximilien rather than talking to her. He let Marguerite's word stand over Charlotte's rather than investigating. He let La Saudraye walk out humiliated rather than defending her.
He was not afraid of confrontation. He was specifically afraid (or, more accurately, avoidant) of the confrontations that would require him to be wrong, or accountable, or responsible for someone else's pain.
The Rosalie Jullien Footnote
Rosalie Jullien observed him at dinner in February 1793 and wrote to her son: "Robespierre jeune is livelier, more open, an excellent patriot; but with a common mind and a contented temper."
The "contented temper" is,, in all honesty,,, the phrase that stays with me. He coasted on goodwill: He was warm, open, charming — probably genuinely those things most of the time. The patterns in this post aren't incompatible with being genuinely warm, they just show what happened when warmth wasn't enough, when the situation needed something harder than charm.. He couldn't do harder. And certainly not with the people who knew him.
Sources:
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano. Translated by me, 2025. Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009. (Especially "Stories of Women" and "Your Brother is No Longer the Same.")
Nodier, Charles. Souvenirs, Portraits, Épisodes de la Révolution et de l'Empire. 2 vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1856. Pages 302–304.
Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1835).
Charlotte Robespierre to Augustin Robespierre, 18 Messidor Year II [July 6, 1794]. Cited in Michon, Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, vol. 2.
Mémoires de Barras, membre du Directoire (1895), vol. 1, pp. 148–149.
Rosalie Jullien to her son, February 2–3, 1793. Cited in Young, chapter 10.
Decree timeline compiled with the help of mathildeaquisexta.
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The obvious companion to the adversaries post. If knowing who hated Bonbon helps paint a picture of who he was, knowing who stood by him — or walked alongside him, or fell for him, or genuinely loved him — might paint an even more vivid one.
Charlotte and Maximilien are not listed here as the sibling situation is genuinely too complicated to squash into a section. Everyone else is fair game.
1. The Arras Foundation: Loyal From Before the Revolution
Antoine-Joseph Buissart
The single most consistent thread of loyalty in Augustin's life outside his immediate family. Buissart was a highly respected lawyer and scientist in Arras — one of those solid, principled pre-revolutionary figures who raised Maximilien almost like a ward and extended the same affection to Augustin. Throughout the brothers' time in Paris, Buissart served as their postal intermediary when they feared their famous surname would cause their letters to be intercepted. He kept the Arras end of the line open for years, and Augustin — who wasn't always great at writing — genuinely loved the man, writing warmly to him about everything from Pas-de-Calais politics to "the little marmots" (the Buissart children)
By the summer of 1794, with Maximilien barricaded in the Duplay house and refusing to answer anyone's letters about Lebon's atrocities, Buissart had essentially given up on the elder Robespierre. It was Augustin he wrote about with desperate hope: "the arrival of Bonbon [...] is the hope of true patriots, the terror of those who dare to persecute them." His wife was staying at the Duplay house at the time — practically in Maximilien's antechamber — and Buissart wrote: "hug him for me, until I can do it myself."
That last line gets me every time honestly
*The caveat that has to go here: Buissart, for all his warmth toward both brothers, did not exactly cover himself in glory after Thermidor. He hastened to denounce them almost immediately (much like a lot of Bonbons other pals). Which is understandable given the terrifying circumstances — but still!!
Régis Deshorties
Augustin's step-cousin — Régis's father had married Augustin's aunt and godmother, Eulaie de Robespierre, as his second wife. Mary Young describes a genuine friendship dating from the Arras years: "a sensitive young man, with Rousseau and Fénelon among his favourite authors." He and Augustin shared jokes about the family, especially about the brewer uncle (Augustin's uncle on the Carraut side), whom they'd nicknamed "Sheltonien" and were, apparently, a bit scared of. Small domestic affections like that.
Régis's sister Anaïs was said to have been an early love interest of Maximilien's — which came to nothing, but didn't seem to damage the friendship between the cousins. His one surviving letter to Augustin, written in July 1794, is touching in its obliviousness: he'd been expecting Charlotte to write and tell him about Augustin's return to Paris, and when he heard nothing, simply assumed everyone was going to come to Arras instead. He ended by asking Augustin to "embrace Charlotte Robespierre and her girlfriends for me" — blissfully unaware, apparently, that the sibling relationship had catastrophically collapsed.
2. The Parisian Household: The Duplays
The Duplay Family
When Augustin and Charlotte arrived in Paris in September 1792, they moved into the Duplay household on Rue Saint-Honoré, where Maximilien had already been lodging for a year. Maurice Duplay was a carpenter; his household included his wife Françoise-Éléonore, three(?) unmarried daughters, son Jacques Maurice, and nephew Simon. Whatever Charlotte's various grievances about Madame Duplay, Augustin's relationship with the family was genuinely warm. He reportedly described Maurice as "the most worthy and generous of men," praised Françoise-Éléonore's housekeeping, and told Philippe Lebas the household "recalled the golden age" — breathing "virtue and pure patriotism." Which is very sweet and also very Bonbon.
Élisabeth Duplay (later Lebas)
Of all the Duplay daughters, Augustin was warmest toward Élisabeth, who married the Conventionnel Philippe Lebas. It was Élisabeth who confirmed, in a note written around 1847, that Augustin's nickname "Bonbon" came from his middle name Bon-Joseph — and the fact that she remembered this specific detail fifty-odd years later and chose to record it suggests she held onto memories of him with some care. Augustin apparently told Lebas that he had "the friendship of a brother" for her, that she was "cheerful and good," and that he liked her best of the sisters.
Philippe Lebas
Primarily known as Maximilien's closest companion, but genuinely close to Augustin too. He chose to die with the Robespierre brothers on 9 Thermidor — shooting himself rather than submit to arrest. His son, Philippe Lebas Jr., later published a testimony about Augustin that includes the famous anecdote about the three of them — Augustin, Simon Duplay, and Jacques Maurice Duplay — going one evening after the opera to the house of salonnière Jeanne-Louise-Françoise de Sainte-Amaranthe, "and this escapade was so severely criticised by Maximilien that, despite all the attraction of such a house for men, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-nine years old, they were careful not to return there."
This is VERY funny if you think about it for a second.. Classic Bonbon behavior honestly
3. Partners on the Road: The Midi Missions
Jean-François Ricord
Augustin's most sustained professional companion and the person he worked most closely with during the most formative period of his political life. Ricord was the deputy for Var, assigned alongside Augustin to the Army of Italy from July 1793 onward. They traveled together, fled federalists together (abandoning their carriage to the Marseille section members in the process), helped engineer the siege of Toulon together, and spent months navigating the violent and chaotic politics of the Midi side by side.
Barras and Fréron — who had every reason to discredit the pair — described Ricord as manipulating Augustin completely, "moving him at will without the latter even realizing it." But given the source, this reads more as a political smear than an accurate portrait. What the record actually shows is two men with a compatible political outlook: both more pragmatic and moderate than the ultraradical faction, both committed to stabilizing the regions they administered rather than devastating them. After Thermidor, Saliceti ordered Napoleon's arrest partly on the grounds that he had carried out a mission on Ricord's orders — which says something about how central Ricord remained to the whole Midi operation even after Augustin was gone.
*Post-Thermidor: Ricord's behavior was... not great. Within days of the news reaching Nice, he wrote to the Committee that he "blushed to have been the friend of Robespierre the Younger" and claimed he was Augustin's "most implacable enemy" from the moment of "his treason." He'd also suppressed a Committee decree ordering Haller's arrest and given Haller a passport to flee to Genoa, which then became its own problem. Mary Young is quietly devastating about this: "It is a vain speculation to ask what Ricord really thought of Augustin. But Augustin had probably cuckolded him." Anyway.
*The Ricord-Augustin relationship gets complicated fast once you introduce Madame Ricord. See below.
Gasparin Sauli
One of the most interesting figures in Augustin's story and the most unjustly obscure. A young Genoese noble and committed republican patriot who attached himself to Augustin after the capture of Toulon — "laid his friendship and his services before him," as Mary Young puts it — and then traveled with him through the entirety of the Franche-Comté mission:
The group that set out for Vesoul in January 1794 consisted of Augustin, Viennot (a chemist from Vesoul), Sauli, and La Saudraye, and they all lodged together at Humbert's house in the rue du Collège. The day after their arrival in Vesoul, Sauli was elected a member of the People's Society. The following evening he gave a speech that is frankly one of the most extravagant pieces of public praise Augustin ever received, apostrophizing him directly in front of the assembled club:
"And you, Robespierre! You who have so many titles to my esteem, my admiration, my friendship! You in whom the rarest talents are joined to a modesty that makes them the more precious! You at once legislator and soldier, by your example you give a model for a courageous man, by your justice that of a man of integrity, by your philanthropy that of a good man..."
He kept going. The Society voted to print both his speech and La Saudraye's.
He was with Augustin throughout the Franche-Comté mission — including the dramatic departure from Besançon, where Nodier describes crowds of women filling the courtyard waiting to present petitions as the carriage drove away. Sauli stayed on through Lyon and then traveled with Augustin back to Nice before returning home to Genoa at the beginning of March. Augustin wrote to him afterward asking for military intelligence about Piedmont and Sardinia, and signed off the letter's last line in Italian — "Si a Oneglia se troaro dei salicie" — which Mary Young suggests (charmingly) was written to show Sauli he hadn't forgotten what he'd been teaching him during their months on the road together.
The aftermath was bleak: Sauli was arrested almost immediately upon returning to Genoa, "perhaps too ingenuous to make a really good spy," per Mary Young. After Thermidor, the village of Jussey — one of the towns Augustin had administered — went so far as to expunge not only Augustin's name from the minutes but Sauli's too, because he had been "close to odious conspirators." The village then burned mannequins of the Robespierres for good measure. This is the French Revolution for you.
Claude-François Humbert
An old college friend of Maximilien's (from Louis-le-Grand) who hosted Augustin in Vesoul. The house in the rue du Collège accommodated Augustin, Sauli, and La Saudraye for the duration of the mission — Nodier called it a "humble abode," though it had to be reasonably large to fit them all. Mary Young notes, somewhat dryly, that Humbert had "supposed Royalist sympathies" which Augustin "apparently was not realising, or choosing to ignore." Humbert ultimately decided to stay in Paris rather than accompany the group south.
Viennot
The apothecary of Vesoul and arguably the loyalest friend Augustin made on the missions. He and Humbert came to Paris together to tell Maximilien about the disastrous situation in the Haute-Saône under Bernard de Saintes — which is how the whole Franche-Comté detour came about in the first place. Viennot showed Augustin his study when they arrived in Vesoul, which turned out to be full of copies of Maximilien's speeches. Mary Young says Viennot "at least was sincere in his liking for Augustin, and would seem to have been trustworthy."
The proof of this came after Thermidor. When Viennot was arrested by Bernard's people, Augustin wrote one of his most impassioned letters in his defense: "Frank, energetic, disinterested, honest, such is the character of Viennot, apothecary of Vesoul... Viennot is an ardent friend of liberty, an honest man who fights intrigue." And then Viennot repaid this loyalty when it actually mattered. After Thermidor, the local Jacobin Boizot tried to get Viennot to co-sign a letter condemning Augustin as a tyrant and claiming they'd both "resisted him when he had power." Viennot refused to sign it. Boizot had to send the letter with only his own name on it. Viennot "always maintained that Augustin was worthy of a better fate."
In a world full of Ricords, Viennot behaved like a Viennot. Good for him!!
4. The Women of the Missions
A note upfront: both Luzzatto and Mary Young discuss these relationships with appropriate uncertainty, and the primary sources — mostly Charlotte's memoirs and various hostile Thermidorian accounts — all have obvious axes to grind. Calibrate accordingly.
Marguerite Ricord
Jean-François Ricord's wife, who traveled south with the mission because Ricord was from Grasse and the assignment was effectively a homecoming for him. She was, by Charlotte's account, "young and seductive" with coquetry "at least equal to her beauty." Charlotte's version of the story — the one that most flatters Augustin — is that Marguerite made advances on him which he nobly resisted out of a sense of honor toward his colleague. The version "more accredited by students of la petite histoire," as Luzzatto puts it, is that he yielded entirely. Either way, the relationship caused the lasting rupture with Charlotte, and Barras and Fréron — AS MENTIONED BEEFOORREEE — found the whole dynamic politically useful — weaponizing Augustin's attachment to discredit him as a puppet of the Ricords' domestic influence when reporting back to Paris.
*What's genuinely interesting here is that Barras's memoirs (liar that he is) describe Napoleon as "assiduously" paying court to Marguerite specifically because of her influence over Augustin. If he is to believed, she was apparently politically proximate enough that Napoleon thought cultivating her was worth his time.
*Post-Thermidor note from Mary Young, who does not let anyone off easy: "Augustin had probably cuckolded [Ricord]. He had also made his colleague's life difficult by prolonged absences in Vesoul and Paris; he had always been a law unto himself. Certainly, Ricord may finally have concluded, he owed nothing to the memory of his friend." See above re: Ricord's letter.
Guillodon La Saudraye
Augustin's mistress during the Franche-Comté mission — a "much-talked-about ex-marchioness" who accompanied him openly through the Haute-Saône. Far from discreetly kept in the background, she was apparently genuinely involved in political decisions: suspects petitioned her directly, asking her to intercede with Augustin for their release. Michelet described her in characteristically overheated terms as "extremely equivocal" and blamed her influence for all manner of things. The scene at the Besançon Jacobin club, where a Bernard de Saintes loyalist (a tinsmith, per Luzzatto) stood up mid-meeting and loudly demanded she be removed, noting that "Robespierre, neither husband nor father, has brought his woman here" — is one of the more vivid small moments of Augustin's story. He apparently took the insult, signaled to her to leave, and she walked out.
*though most of what we know about Saudraye is through Nordier who was, again, 12 years old.. take the whole thing with grains upon grains of salt
*Augustin's letter to Maximilien asking him to meet with La Saudraye and hear from her firsthand about conditions in the departments is one of the more interesting windows into how he thought about knowledge. He described it as "necessary information to come to know certain characters who play a role in the Revolution." He genuinely seemed to believe that what she had seen and heard mattered, and that Maximilien — barricaded in Paris — couldn't understand conditions on the ground without hearing from people who had actually been there.
5. The Italian Connection
Napoléon Bonaparte
The most famous entry on this list by some distance. Their relationship is documented from so many angles — Charlotte's memoirs, Madame Junot's, Barras's, Napoleon's own accounts at Saint Helena, Lucien Bonaparte's memoirs — that it's almost unusually well-evidenced by the standards of Augustin's life.
The basics: they met properly around the time of the siege of Toulon, where Napoleon commanded the artillery. Augustin identified him early, writing to Maximilien in April 1794 about "citizen Buonaparte, general head of the artillery of transcendent merit" — noting his Corsican origin and that he could be trusted because he'd resisted Paoli's overtures when it would have been profitable to do otherwise. That's the only surviving letter in which Augustin mentions Napoleon directly.
By the spring of 1794, according to Napoleon's own much-later accounts, the friendship was intimate enough that Augustin consulted him on virtually everything: "Robespierre would never sign anything to do with the army or the supplies without consulting me. He would say to Haller who was then administrator: 'That's good, but I must speak to Bonaparte.'" He also believed that Augustin asked Maximilien to make him Commander of the Army of Italy — and that Carnot blocked it.
The most dramatic episode comes from Lucien Bonaparte's memoirs: Napoleon was apparently offered the job of replacing Henriot as commandant of Paris, through Augustin's connections, and turned it down. Lucien records him saying: "The young Robespierre is an honest fellow; but his brother is not to be trifled with: he will be obeyed. Can I support that man?! No, never." He then announced that the only honorable place for him was the army, that they must have patience, and that "I shall command Paris hereafter!" The younger Robespierre solicited him in vain.
Charlotte adds an almost unbelievable detail in her memoirs: that after 9 Thermidor, Napoleon proposed to the remaining representatives on mission with the Army of Italy that they march on Paris to punish the Thermidorians and avenge the brothers. The representatives were apparently so terrified by this that they hurried to reject it. No other source confirms this but it sounds exactly like the Napoleon of 1794.
His letter to Tilly after Thermidor: "I was a little affected by the tragedy of the younger Robespierre, whom I loved and believed to be pure, but, had he been my father, I would have stabbed him myself if he aspired to tyranny." He loved him well. He also spent several weeks under arrest anyway for his association with the Robespierres, which is perhaps the Revolution's form of dark comedy. And years later, he received Charlotte at the Consulate and gave her a pension — speaking of her brothers "in very flattering terms."
Charlotte, for her part, describes Napoleon's admiration for Maximilien and friendship with Augustin as straightforwardly genuine: "Bonaparte was sincerely a republican; I would even say that he was a montagnard republican; at least he had that effect on me." Madame Junot's memoirs add that Augustin was "what might be called an agreeable young man, animated by no bad sentiments."
Haller ("Papa Haller")
The Swiss banker put in charge of army supplies in Nice from October 1793 onward. Tall, thin-faced, blue-eyed, with — somewhat eccentrically for the period — a red beard. The kind of man who "gets things done": highly intelligent, a bit sharp, with extensive connections in Genoa. Ricord's report introducing him to the Committee was "slightly defensive," as Mary Young notes — his civisme was "not quite above question" — but they couldn't do without him. He was popular enough with the officers that they called him "Papa Haller."
Mary Young describes him as performing "the overwhelming task of feeding the town and army where honesty would not have sufficed." His relationship with Augustin was close enough to become a liability after Thermidor: the Thermidorians accused him of being "the principal agent" in Augustin's supposed crimes, demanded his arrest, and discovered that Ricord had already quietly given him a passport to flee to Genoa. He made it to Switzerland. Years later Napoleon employed him — which tracks.
A Note on Monvoison
I'd be leaving something out if I didn't mention the frankly suspicious school friend. Monvoison was a wealthy man Augustin spent time with during his Paris interlude in December 1793 – January 1794. A police report noted that "he had been educated with Robespierre the Younger (at Louis-le-Grand) and that is the cause of the intimacy between them." He was, per the same report, suspected of making money on the side and "said to have had friends who had been guillotined." He talked of going back to Nice with Augustin and making a great deal of money there. Mary Young observes dryly that Augustin "probably had no intention of taking him, but the fact that he associated with such a doubtful character showed his usual carelessness over his acquaintances." He is a figure in the post-Thermidor accusations against Augustin — the claim that "all his friends had been aristocrats" gestures at exactly this kind of association.
Bonbon's complete inability to vet his social circle is extremely on-brand.
ANYWAYS
The rough chronology:
Pre-revolutionary loyalties: Buissart, the Arras circle
The Parisian interlude: the Duplay household, Lebas
The missions: Ricord, Marguerite, La Saudraye, Napoleon, Sauli etc.,
What strikes me comparing this list to the adversaries one is how heavily the friends cluster around the mission period too — just like the enemies. Almost everything that mattered to Augustin personally (outside family and the Duplay household) was forged on the road, in the chaos of the Midi and Franche-Comté, far from Maximilien and far from Paris. Buissart and Deshorties are the great exceptions, the long roots from before the Revolution.
And the post-Thermidor picture is stark. Among everyone listed here: Ricord denounced him. Haller fled. Napoleon distanced himself (while remaining under arrest anyway). Viennot refused to denounce him. Sauli's name was expunged from minutes. The village of Vesoul — in June 1795, ten months after his death — was still saying "he treated us as good citizens; he simply gave us justice."
Sources:
The same sources as the adversaries post carry this one equally, with the heaviest weight falling on Luzzatto's chapters "Stories of Women," "Your Brother is No Longer the Same," and "Only Bonbon," plus Mary Young throughout..
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: Il Terrore dal volto umano. Translated by me, 2025. Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009.
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (Chapters 10–16 and 20 especially.)
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. 2 vols. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926.
Poupé, Edmond. "Robespierre Jeune et Gasparin Sauli." Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française (1962). [Primary source for Sauli; Mary Young draws on this directly.]
For Napoleon specifically:
Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1835)
Mémoires de la Duchesse d'Abrantès [Madame Junot] (1832)
Mémoires de Barras, membre du Directoire (1895)
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1823)
Mémoires de Lucien Bonaparte, prince de Canino (1836)
Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène 1816–1821 by Henri Gratien Bertrand, vol. 2 (1951) — cited in Mary Young, chapter 16.
This is honestly a post/list I've been wanting to make for a while, mostly because of my own needs and wants to have a dedicated place to refer to in order to know how others felt about Bonbon, and vice versa..
Now that it's nearly summer break for me before I start college in the fall, I feel like I have an adequate opportunity to begin this project of mine!!
There were a lot of things I've forgotten about over this past year of dedicating my life and mental energy (especially to daydreaming of) the younger Robespierre (SHAME!!!), and I keep getting surprised going back and reading and being like, "wait.. I thought Fréron and Bonbon were TIGHT!! Didn't he defend him that one time?!!" Even though I SHOULD know that Fréron is like 1/3 men who LOATHED Bonbon...
ANYWAYS!!
Here is a comprehensive breakdown of the figures, factions, and historical detractors who found themselves at odds with Bonbon throughout his life and legacy.
1. The Local Rivals: The Arras & Pas-de-Calais Factions
Before making waves on the national stage in Paris, Augustin spent plenty of energy battling provincial conservatives and moderate factions right in his own backyard.
Beaumetz:
The president of the Conseil d'Artois who weaponized a clever pamphlet campaign against Maximilien during the election of the Third Estate. He preyed on the credulous peasantry by spreading rumors that the elder Robespierre actively wrote against religion. (Or. in a more neutral way: He participated in a pamphlet campaign against the Robespierres during the Estates-General elections, including allegations that Maximilien was hostile to religion.)
The Departmental Council / The Feuillants:
This moderately Royalist majority in the Pas-de-Calais council constantly clashed with Augustin over his fierce demands to hold departmental sessions in public: Their Procurer-General even openly attacked Augustin as a calumniator, prompting Augustin to strike back with the "firmness of an incensed Roman".
2. Estranged Allies
Joseph Lebon:
Though initially a close ally, a local curé, and the helpful Mayor of Arras who helped secure Augustin's provisional post as Procurer General, the relationship was fraught. Early on, Augustin showed an underlying distrust of Lebon’s pushy, volatile nature. This structural rift deepened during the affair of the Parisian commissioners Jason and Legray, where Lebon prioritized local popularity over strict adherence to Parisian Jacobin mandates — a foreshadowing of the bloody divergence in their later revolutionary missions.
*Lebon and Augustin certainly had tensions, especially by 1794, but they were not consistent enemies in the same way Barras, Bernard, or Carnot were: Mary Young repeatedly portrays their relationship as one of growing divergence rather than outright hostility. Augustin increasingly disliked the methods that made Lebon infamous, but there is little evidence of a personal vendetta comparable to what developed with Barras or Bernard.
Antoine Christophe Saliceti:
A fellow Jacobin deputy on mission with the Army of Italy. Though they initially worked together alongside the young artillery general Napoleon Bonaparte, deep ideological and personal rifts opened between them over military authority and regional administration. While never as openly hostile as figures like Barras or Bernard de Saintes, the relationship grew noticeably strained as Augustin's moderation deepened: Saliceti’s hardline political maneuvering frequently clashed with Augustin’s increasingly pragmatic, anti-terror stance, fracturing their alliance in the critical months leading up to Thermidor.
*if it wasn't clear: Saliceti is also less clearly an "enemy" than Barras or Bernard.. Maybe the same situation with Leblond applies here
3. The Big League Enemies: The Girondins (Brissotins & Rolandins)
Once Augustin joined the National Convention, the factional warfare between the Montagnards and the Girondins became his primary fixation, pulling him into aggressive, hardline political stances.
Jean-Marie Roland:
The Minister of the Interior who used public funds to print and distribute thousands of copies of anti-Robespierre speeches. Roland tried desperately to corrupt the public spirit in the Pas-de-Calais, though Augustin took immense pride in the fact that his family successfully unmasked these plots.
Jean-Baptiste Louvet:
The Girondin who dramatically pointed a finger at Maximilien in the Convention and shouted, "I accuse you". Rushing to his brother's defense, Augustin became deeply agitated and claimed to have personally overheard Louvet’s supporters plotting to murder Maximilien: Augustin had to be held back from physically attacking these would-be assassins.
Jean-Denis Lanjuinais:
A prominent Girondin supporter whose memoirs highlighted the extreme volatility of the Convention. He explicitly noted that Augustin and other deputies on both sides of the aisle were known to wave pistols around during their explosive debates.
The Advocates for Catherine Clere:
During the height of the factional war in the spring of 1793, several Girondin deputies attempted to secure a reprieve for Catherine Clere, a woman sentenced to death for a food-supply disturbance, arguing she was merely drunk and politically ignorant. Locked into a fanaticized anti-Girondin stance, Augustin ruthlessly opposed the motion, declaring, "We have passed a law against Royalism, and those who speak against the law are Royalists," helping defeat attempts to spare her from execution — an act starkly out of character with his later moderation.
4. The Radicals & True Enemies
The relationship with hardline radicals is one of the most fascinating layers of Augustin's political trajectory, showing how quickly the shifting tides of the Revolution turned allies into executioners.
Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron:
In the spring of 1793, Augustin was actually closely identified with these extremists, joining them on the benches to aggressively heckle Girondin speakers. Hostile observers even lumped them together as ferocious "aboyeurs" (hecklers). However, Augustin’s later missions to the South completely shifted his outlook; he began adopting moderate policies, releasing prisoners, and realizing that terror was actively damaging the Jacobin cause. This sudden moderation deeply alienated hardline radicals who embraced terrorist tactics, turning former political allies into the very men who would ultimately pull the Robespierre brothers down in Thermidor. Despite later assumptions that the two were close friends, they appear better understood as political allies of convenience during the struggle against the Girondins. By 1794 they found themselves on opposite sides of the question of revolutionary repression.
*Additionally: In the spring of 1793, Augustin was closely identified with these extremists. However, the mission to the South (the Midi) proved to be the breaking point. The close tie between Augustin and the Ricords — specifically his infatuation with Madame Ricord — deeply alienated their fellow Conventionals on mission. Fréron and Barras explicitly feared that the "Ricord-Robespierre jeune" pair would act as "moderates" and obstruct their plans for the bloody extermination and destruction of Toulon. While Barras and Fréron orchestrated mass executions and enriched themselves, Augustin and Ricord advocated for a more pragmatic approach to stabilize the region. In response, Fréron and Barras weaponized this dynamic by mocking Augustin as a puppet easily manipulated by the Ricords' domestic influence, using this characterization to discredit his political authority and report him as weak-willed to the central government. This eventually forced a permanent split, with Augustin later facing their active hostility as he attempted to advocate for justice and release political prisoners
Paul Barras:
Alongside Fréron, Barras served as a representative on mission in the South who epitomized the brutal, blood-drenched excesses of the Terror that Augustin came to despise. While Barras and Fréron enriched themselves and enacted mass executions at Toulon and Marseille, Augustin openly split from them, advocating for justice over indiscriminate slaughter. This earned him the permanent, lethal enmity of Barras, who viewed Augustin's moderation as a direct threat to his own survival and corruption, making Barras a key architect of the Thermidorian coup.
*little note here: I can't really tell how adverse I'm making this relationship seem.. So, for clarification, this is less "Augustin and Barras spent months glaring at each other across rooms like anime rivals." and more like political 'allies' turned opponents whose relationship deteriorated significantly during the Midi missions and culminated in their being on opposite sides of Thermidor: I mean, they literally casually greet each other at dinner, while Maxime pouts and refuses to acknowledge Barras; and the fact that they are still exchanging greetings days before Thermidor suggests that whatever hostility existed had not reached the point of open personal warfare: A lot of it just goes back to the footnote under Fréron on Barras's behalf of the relationship with Augustin
Lazare Carnot:
One of the most consequential enemies of the Robespierrist circle during Year II. Carnot's relationship with Maximilien and Saint-Just deteriorated into open warfare inside the Committee of Public Safety, with accusations of dictatorship, threats of prosecution, and explosive personal confrontations. Augustin was drawn into this conflict as both a loyal Robespierrist and an increasingly active participant in investigations into Carnot's conduct, throwing himself into his desperate attempts to destroy Carnot. Only days before Thermidor, Augustin encouraged recently liberated patriots from Arras to brief his brother on accusations against Carnot. After throwing himself from the Hôtel de Ville on 10 Thermidor, Augustin explicitly named Carnot as a conspirator in his final recorded political testimony. Carnot, for his part, later described himself as Robespierre's "most declared enemy." Taken together, the evidence suggests that by the summer of 1794 hostility between Carnot and the younger Robespierre had become both political and deeply personal.
Bernard de Saintes:
Perhaps Augustin's clearest enemy among fellow Montagnards. As representatives on mission in neighboring regions, Bernard and Augustin embodied two increasingly incompatible visions of revolutionary government. Bernard aggressively expanded arrests and repression, while Augustin released prisoners and attempted to soften the application of Terror in the Franche-Comté and Haute-Saône. Their feud became public and vicious. Bernard denounced Augustin to Paris, while Augustin retaliated by attacking Bernard's conduct, accusing him of indecency, vanity, being so skinny he could be swept away by a light breeze, and abuse of authority. The clash became famous enough that decades later Charles Nodier still remembered witnessing Augustin publicly confront Bernard at the Jacobin Club of Besançon. Their conflict was not merely personal; it symbolized the growing divide between Augustin's late-Year II moderation and the hardline revolutionary methods Bernard continued to champion.
5. The Post-Mortem Detractors: Hostile Sources
The animosity didn't stop at the guillotine. After Thermidor, a wave of memoirs and histories sought to thoroughly trash Bonbon's reputation, cementing a highly partisan historical record.
Many of these writers may have disagreed sharply with one another on Maximilien Robespierre, yet remarkably converged on portraying Augustin as intellectually insignificant, creating one of the most persistent legends surrounding his historical reputation.
Le Blond de Neuvéglise:
One of the earliest post-Thermidor biographers who laconically dismissed Augustin in 1795 as a man entirely "without brains, without talent, without character" who possessed only a "brutal, ferocious instinct".
Marc-Antoine Baudot:
A fellow conventionnel who left behind incredibly dismissive historical notes, writing that Augustin had a "narrow and ignorant brain" and was viewed by the Convention as an "absolute fool". Baudot famously and cuttingly summarized him as nothing more than "a jar that echoed whenever his brother rapped on it".
Pierre Villiers:
A commentator who claimed to be Maximilien's secretary and published highly malicious gossip branding Augustin as a "miserable attorney, moneyless, false, drunken and crapulous".
What strikes me most while researching Augustin's opponents is how varied they were. Some were royalists, some Girondins, some fellow Montagnards, some former allies, and some only attacked him after his death. The sheer diversity of these adversaries makes it difficult to reduce Augustin to a single political identity. The man denounced by Beaumetz in Artois, condemned by Louvet in the Convention, feuding with Bernard in Franche-Comté, and mocked by Baudot after Thermidor was not always the same Augustin.
I guess the chronology is roughly:
Provincial reformer fighting local conservatives.
Radical anti-Girondin deputy.
Representative-on-mission.
Increasingly moderate critic of Terror.
Thermidorian victim.
Historical punching bag.
So you can take it as a sense of development rather than just accumulating names.. if you will
Sources & Further Reading:
Core Historiography & Modern Analysis
Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre: II Terrore dal volto umano. Translated into English by me, 2025. (Original Italian edition: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2009.)
Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011.
Augustin's Correspondence
Michon, Georges, ed. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre. 2 vols. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926.
For Arras, Early Career, & Pas-de-Calais
Lavoine, A. Autour de Robespierre en Artois. Unpublished manuscript, Archives du Pas-de-Calais.
Lecesne, E. Arras sous la Révolution. 3 vols. Arras: Sueur-Charruey, 1882.
Paris, A.-J. La Jeunesse de Robespierre et la Convocation des États Généraux en Artois. Arras: Veuve Rousseau-Leroy, 1870.
Paris, A.-J. La Terreur dans le Pas-de-Calais et dans le Nord: Histoire de Joseph Le Bon et des Tribunaux Révolutionnaires d'Arras et de Cambrai. Arras: Rousseau-Leroy, 1864.
For Bernard de Saintes & Franche-Comté
Lods, A. Un Conventionnel en Mission: Bernard des Saintes et la Réunion de la Principauté de Montbéliard à la France. Paris: Fischbacher, 1888.
Mathiez, Albert. "Les Arrêtés de Robespierre Jeune dans sa mission de Franche-Comté." Annales Révolutionnaires 8 (1916): 79–130.
Mathiez, Albert. "Robespierre Jeune en Franche-Comté." Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 7 (1914): 309–337.
Nodier, Charles. Souvenirs, Portraits, Épisodes de la Révolution et de l'Empire. 2 vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1856.
For Barras, Fréron, & Midi Missions
Poupé, Edmond, ed. Lettres de Barras et de Fréron en Mission dans le Midi. Draguignan: Latil Frères, 1910.
Poupé, Edmond. "Robespierre Jeune, Ricord et les Fédéralistes Varois." Bulletin de la Société d'Études Scientifiques et Archéologiques de Draguignan 24 (1902): 427–440.
Poupé, Edmond. "Robespierre Jeune et Gasparin Sauli." Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française (1962).
For Hostile Post-Thermidor Accounts
Le Blond de Neuvéglise [Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart]. La vie et les crimes de Robespierre. Augsburg: Chez Tous les Libraires, 1795.
Villiers, Pierre. Souvenirs d'un Déporté. Paris: Chez l'Auteur, 1802.
or ignore this whole bibliography and just look at @/anotherhumaninthisworld 's posts