#academic articles

"In June 1791, Saint-Just published L’Esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution de la France in Paris. This book bears “Louis-Léon de Saint-Just” as the author's name. This same name appears in the edition of his Discours sur la proposition d’entourer la Convention nationale d’une garde-armée (Discourse on the Proposal to Surround the National Convention with an Armed Guard), delivered at the Jacobins on October 22, 1792. Thus, Saint-Just reinstated the particle in his name while removing his regular middle name of Antoine for the public. He therefore abandoned the names of Léonard and Florelle that he had given himself.

Why substitute Léon for Antoine? Ernest Hamel, from a family allied to that of Saint-Just and who has, in a way, collected the family tradition, provides the following explanation: this first name of Antoine having seemed a little common and inharmonious in the family, he was given that of Léon; it was therefore quite natural that he signed his works with the first name by which he was known. (13)

There is no reason to doubt the validity of this explanation. Saint-Just certainly took up the name consecrated by usage. But from now on, thanks to a notoriety acquired precisely at the Jacobin session of October 22, 1792, the young conventionnel would sign and call himself simply Saint-Just."

The paternal ancestry of Saint-Just, as far back as can be precisely traced (prior to the last quarter of the 17th century), originates in Chelles, Picardy—a village near Pierrefonds on the current border of the Oise and Aisne departments. The family later settled in Attichy, Nampcel, Morsain, and Blérancourt, on the borders of the same departments (1). 

Notably, the name "Saint-Just" also designates three localities in the modern Oise department: Saint-Just-des-Marais, incorporated today into Beauvais; Saint-Just-en-Chaussée, a canton capital between Clermont and Breteuil; Saint-Just, a château and hamlet in the commune of Belle-Église, near Bornel (2). Additionally, a fountain near Laon in the Aisne department has borne the name "Saint-Just" since at least 1265 (3).

Across France, numerous communes, hamlets, and settlements are named Saint-Just. The nomenclature of communes lists 10 "Saint-Just" without a particular name and 20 with specific names (4). We note around thirty by consulting the nomenclature of the offices of post, telegraph and telephone systems before the war of 1914-1918. Among these Saint-Justs, some do not correspond with a Saint-Just designating a commune name. By estimating around thirty places bearing the name Saint-Just, we are therefore committing an underestimation compared to reality. This is evident, for example, from the fact that the grandmother of the grandiose 1848 revolutionary Ernest Cœurderoy (1825–1862) came from a Saint-Just hamlet near Moutiers-Saint-Jean (Côte-d’Or) (5), a hamlet which does not appear in the names indicated above.

To the extent that the names of places often derive from the names of people, or vice versa, we can be certain that there have existed and still exist Saint-Just families of origins other than the family of the conventionnel. Among his known contemporaries, do we not count the poet Mérard de Saint-Just, born in Paris; the magistrate and constituent Fréteau de Saint-Just, born in Melun; and the writer Godard d'Aucour de Saint-Just, born in Paris, who published all his works under the name of Saint-Just?

Around the mid-19th century, living in La Moulinière, a commune of Villers-Saint-Paul (Oise), was a Madame Martel née Saint-Just (6). One is led to believe that she too did not belong to the Convention member 's own family if one studies the latter 's genealogy closely.

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Before the Revolution, there is no doubt that the name of Saint-Just's ancestors was always preceded by the particle. However, the father of the conventionnel, registered at birth (1715) as the son of Charles de Saint-Just, married (1765) under the name “de Saint-Just de Richebourg,” and is recorded upon his death (1777) under the name of “Louis Jean Saint-Just de Richebourg.” His wife, son, and daughters appear in parish registers mostly with the particle. The conventionnel’s mother, commonly called Madame de Saint-Just, was nevertheless listed upon her death (1811) as “the widow of Louis Saint-Just” (7).

At his birth on August 25, 1767, Saint-Just was given the first names Louis Antoine.  These appear on his baptismal certificate in the Decize Municipal Archives and correspond to legal first names at the time.

L’Organt appeared in 1789 without an author’s name. It gives us no information on Saint-Just’s first names. Both for the printing of the work and to escape the prosecution it aroused upon its publication, Saint-Just stayed in Paris for at least two months, calling himself Léonard Florelle de Saint-Just.

Why Léonard? This saint is the patron of prisoners. Is it to recall, by protest and in a sort of defiance, the painful time when he was locked up in Paris in 1786? There is hardly any other explanation. (Xiran Note: Actually, it's probably derived from the name of his maternal grandfather Léonard Robinot). Why Florelle? This first name, or rather literary pseudonym, has poetic flair. It corresponds to the cheerful period when the "Chevalier Organt" played the dandy in the capital, completing his teasing of the Muses and launching his tragicomic poem. There is a striking contrast between the two names. But should we simply see the name “Florelle,” as noted by Mme M.-A. Charmelot (8), as the Greek translation of Antoine, Saint-Just’s usual given name? This explanation is plausible.

At the electoral assembly of Chauny (17-26 May 1790), Saint-Just, yielding to the wishes of the delegates, placed in the hands of the president, to be attached to the minutes, his speech in favor of the choice of Soissons as capital of the department of Aisne. He signed this document "Florelle de Saint-Just, elector of Blérancourt." The photograph of this signature with the five and a half lines preceding it is preserved in the Departmental Archives of Aisne and appears in the classic work of René Hennequin (9). But on the following 3 June, in his letter to Camille Desmoulins giving a precise account of the assembly of Chauny, Saint-Just simply signed "Saint-Just" (10). He signed the same in his famous letter to Robespierre on 19 August 1790 (11). In the meantime, the register of deliberations of the General Council of the commune of Blérancourt still referred to him as “M. de Saint-Just” on the dates of June 24 and July 2, 1790 (12).

In June 1791, Saint-Just published L’Esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution de la France in Paris. This book bears “Louis-Léon de Saint-Just” as the author's name. This same name appears in the edition of his Discours sur la proposition d’entourer la Convention nationale d’une garde-armée (Discourse on the Proposal to Surround the National Convention with an Armed Guard), delivered at the Jacobins on October 22, 1792. Thus, Saint-Just reinstated the particle in his name while removing his regular middle name of Antoine for the public. He therefore abandoned the names of Léonard and Florelle that he had given himself.

Why substitute Léon for Antoine? Ernest Hamel, from a family allied to that of Saint-Just and who has, in a way, collected the family tradition, provides the following explanation: this first name of Antoine having seemed a little common and inharmonious in the family, he was given that of Léon; it was therefore quite natural that he signed his works with the first name by which he was known. (13)

There is no reason to doubt the validity of this explanation. Saint-Just certainly took up the name consecrated by usage. But from now on, thanks to a notoriety acquired precisely at the Jacobin session of October 22, 1792, the young conventionnel would sign and call himself simply Saint-Just.

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It’s the Journal des Jacobins, reporting the October 22, 1792, speech, that established and in some way accredited in the public the short and simple name of "Saint-Just." Though it credited it with a mistake, printing the name as “Sinjeu.”  As Aulard notes: "This seems to indicate that contemporaries did not pronounce the last two letters” (14). It also seems to indicate, we will say, a writer of Picard origin; because, in the dialect of Picardy, u's are transformed into eu's. The error is corrected in the issue of the same sheet which reports the session of November 4, 1792, marked by a new intervention by Saint-Just. His name, amputated of the particle, is reported this time very accurately (15).

But it must be believed that the name of “Saint-Just” had not permeated public consciousness as one might suppose. Indeed, Prudhomme's journal, in its article on the first discussion in the Convention concerning the trial of the king, on the following 13 November, gives the intervention of Saint-Just and violently criticizes it. It reports it as being that of “Méard de Saint-Just,” repeated four times, ruling out a typo.

One wonders if the anonymous writer sought to discredit the conventionnel by conflating him, by virtue of a near homonymy, with the licentious poet Mérard de Saint-Just. It is true that in the same issue, in the usual place devoted to summary reports of the debates of the Convention, the intervention of the deputy of Aisne on November 13 is indeed recorded as “Saint-Just” (17). It is under this name that the intervention of the young member of the Convention will be reported in the subsequent issue on December 27 (18), and thereafter he will not be referred to otherwise.

The dropping of the particle had become a practice of the time. While not common, it was not rare. It successively entered the framework of de-aristocratization and dechristianization. It should be noted, however, that Saint-Just stopped at the elimination of the particle. He did not push the mutation like his fellow Picard Saint-Simon who, as early as September 20, 1790, before the General Council of Péronne, had renounced his proscribed name to call himself “Bonhomme,” in the plebeian manner (19). However, it is not by chance that in the year II Saint-Just modified his name by signing Saint-Juste on the decrees of the Committee of Public Safety (20). It was undoubtedly to better mark his concern for justice on the basis of his name. By the roundabout way of adding a final letter to his name, Saint-Just thus comes closer to all those who at the time changed their name by giving it a moral or civic meaning.

But if the suppression of the particle can be seen in Saint-Just as a democratic pledge, his changes or modifications of his given names do not present themselves in the same light. They preceded year II, and even before the first revolutionary names given to newborns, if we accept with Mathiez, that they date from the Fête de la Fédération. It must therefore be noted that Saint-Just’s given name modifications have no civic character. Moreover, in the midst of dechristianization, in his report to the Convention of 23 Ventôse Year II (Xiran Note: March 13, 1794), Saint-Just condemned the “hypocrites in patriotism” who changed their surnames and given names.