#historical analysis

This is a close reading of the Précis des opérations faites par Robespierre jeune dans le département de la Haute-Saône, reproduced in Michon's Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, vol. I, pp. 257–261. Read directly from the original. All translations mine.

The Précis is the closest thing we have to Augustin writing a sustained, considered account of his own conduct and thinking as a representative on mission. It's not a letter dashed off in the field. It's a formal report to the Committee of Public Safety, written after the Franche-Comté mission concluded, from Commune-Affranchie (Lyon) in February 1794. He had time to decide what to include, how to frame it, and what to leave out. Arguably that makes the choices visible in a way that letters in the heat of action aren't really.

What follows is a section-by-section reading:

The pattern of who held and who folded after 9 Thermidor is one of the more revealing things about the people in Augustin's life: Nobody comes out of this entirely clean, and the variations are genuinely instructive.

A note on sourcing upfront: this post draws primarily on Mary Young's chapter 19, which is the most comprehensive account of the immediate post-Thermidor fates assembled anywhere. Endnote references are included where the underlying source matters.

Philippe Lebas: Chose Death

He shot himself on 9 Thermidor rather than submit to arrest. This requires no analysis — it's undoubtedly the cleanest data point in the whole file. He had dinner with Augustin, Maximilien, Saint-Just, and David four days earlier on the Champs-Élysées. He chose to die with them rather than survive without them. Young doesn't editorialize, and neither will I.

Jean-François Ricord: Held for Approximately Zero Days

The news reached Nice on 18 Thermidor. Ricord went to Grasse, read a letter, came back: He wrote a proclamation to the people of the Alpes-Maritimes that managed to announce the executions without naming Augustin specifically — letting the Convention's own proclamation carry that weight. Then the next day he wrote to the Committee directly:

"I blush to have been the friend of Robespierre the Younger. It is true that I thought him honest; but from the moment of his treason he had no more implacable enemy than me... I am sorry I was not in the Convention to vote for the deaths of the criminal scoundrels who had the audacity to conspire against liberty."

Young's comment: "It is a vain speculation to ask what Ricord really thought of Augustin. But Augustin had probably cuckolded him. 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, now become a dangerous embarrassment."

It also emerged that Ricord had already suppressed a Committee decree ordering Haller's arrest and given him a passport to Genoa. He had, in other words, protected Haller while preparing to denounce Augustin. The surviving and the denunciation were coordinated acts, not impulsive reactions.

Ricord was eventually sent back to Paris and had to defend his actions before the Convention. No serious action was taken against him.

Saliceti: From Artistic Distance to Competitive Denunciation

Saliceti had been absent from the Army of Italy for months, but Thermidor gave him the opportunity to reconstruct his relationship to the whole Midi operation from the safety of Barcelonette. His letter to the Committee: "You know that since the expedition to Oneglia I have not been with the Army of Italy and even asked you to recall me. But I can explain, now that we are free, that I did not wish to participate in the enormous abuses which in this part of the world were authorised with an impudence which made all republicans mourn."

He then joined Laporte and Albitte in a collective letter accusing Augustin, Ricord, Haller, and Bonaparte of betraying military plans to the enemy. The theory is that: Napoleon's mysterious journey to Genoa was cover for delivering the French armies to Piedmont. This is the accusation that got Napoleon arrested for eleven days before it collapsed.

Haller: Made It Out

Ricord's passport got Haller to Genoa before the Committee's arrest warrant could catch him: He made his way to Switzerland. In after years he was employed by Napoleon — which is either poetic justice or the Revolution's standard operating procedure, depending on how you look at it. "Papa Haller," who had been feeding the Army of Italy while making a fortune on the side, outlasted everyone who'd tried to manage him.

Napoleon: The Complicated Clearing of His Name

Napoleon was arrested at Fort Carré at Antibes on 29 Thermidor on the strength of the Saliceti/Laporte/Albitte accusations. He wrote letters protesting his innocence. One of them — to Tilly, the French chargé d'affaires in Genoa — contains the line we've already quoted: "I was somewhat affected by the catastrophe of Robespierre the Younger, since I loved him and believed him pure, but had he been my father I would have stabbed him had he aspired to tyranny."

He was released on 24 August, too useful to stay imprisoned. When he encountered Barras again in October 1795 and needed to clear himself of Robespierrist associations, he did so by telling a story about Augustin's humanity — the orphaned child clothed and brought to his table, the boy refusing to drink to the Republic, Augustin telling Ricord "Respect such a character. You would not do as much in similar circumstances." Young's note: "Perhaps Augustin's reproach to his friend struck home." It's a curious thing, to use the man's decency as your alibi.

Boizot: Congratulated Himself

The National Agent of Vesoul — the man who had written florid Rousseauistic letters to La Saudraye about the beauties of local life while simultaneously trying to build his career around Augustin's connections — immediately sent a congratulatory letter to the Convention on news of Augustin's death. He was "even more delighted," per Girardot (vol. III, p. 157), when shortly after "there was a celebration in which the effigies of the Robespierres were burned to the sound of drums and dancing of the people."

He then composed a letter, supposedly from both himself and Viennot, stating that they had never "merited the horrible favour of the tyrant Robespierre" and that he himself had "resisted them when they had power." He wrote this while sitting on his own letter to Guillodon de La Saudraye, which began "every day they try to destroy you" and called her influence over Augustin irresistible: He could not get Viennot to sign the letter.

Viennot: The One Who Held

Viennot — the apothecary of Vesoul, in whose study Augustin had found copies of all Maximilien's speeches, for whom Augustin had written an impassioned defense when he was arrested by Bernard's people — refused to sign Boizot's letter: He had to send it under his own name alone.

Young: "Viennot behaved with more dignity. He always maintained that Augustin was worthy of a better fate."

That's the entirety of what we have about Viennot's post-Thermidor stance, and it's enough.

Bernard de Saintes: Still Going About It in June 1795

Bernard was "still racked by the thought of his weakness with Robespierre the Younger" months later. He wrote a long statement documenting Augustin's behavior toward him — how Augustin had sworn at Besançon to destroy him, how after Thermidor he had received a "host of letters congratulating me on my escape from this tyrant, who would not have hesitated to denounce me had he not been executed himself." He accused the people of Vesoul of planning to put up a column in Augustin's memory and encase his speeches in a leaden coffer.

The people of Vesoul, by June 1795, had "plucked up enough courage to answer back." They denied the column and the leaden coffer. They said: "Robespierre the Younger never flattered us and we flattered him still less. He treated us as good citizens; he simply gave us justice. We judged him by the civil and moral qualities he showed among us."

This is the closest thing in the record to a defense of Augustin by people with no political stake in defending him. They had every reason to stay quiet. They didn't.

Guillodon de La Saudraye: A Little House Near Sens

M. de La Saudraye died in the spring of 1795. The widowed Guillodon — the "much-talked-about ex-marchioness" who had walked out of the Besançon Jacobin Club when a tinsmith demanded her removal, who had lobbied for the Vesoul patriots after Augustin left, who had tried to use her contacts for the people who'd needed her help — was very badly off. She sold part of her late husband's library and bought herself a small house near Sens.

That's the last we hear of her.

Sauli: "Faithful to the Noble Principles of His Life"

Sauli was arrested immediately on his return to Genoa — "perhaps too ingenuous to make a really good spy," as Young puts it. He was imprisoned for six months. He bore his captivity, per his biographer Pellet, with cheerfulness, writing to his family and reading history. Afterward he became the editor of a liberal newspaper in Genoa. He died in 1841. Pellet's epitaph: "faithful to the noble principles of his life."

The village of Jussey, not content with removing Augustin's name from its minutes, also removed all mention of Sauli on grounds that he had been "close to odious conspirators." He outlived them by nearly fifty years. (wooooo!!!)

Buissart: Attacked, Survived, Respected

Buissart underwent "unpleasant attacks" because of his documented close friendship with the Robespierres. In the end it had to be acknowledged that he had done everything in his power to help Arras during the Terror — those desperate letters to Maximilien, his wife's long stay at the Duplay house, his advocacy for the imprisoned judges. He took no further part in public life: He lived to a respected old age in Arras. His sons — "the little marmots" of Augustin's letters — grew up to be well-known lawyers in the town.

Charlotte: The Longest Arc

Charlotte stayed in Paris, in considerable poverty, until Napoleon received her and granted her a pension. She then, being Charlotte, pestered Napoleon and Joséphine to such a degree that they eventually closed their doors to her. She survived until 1834, accumulating and then repudiating different versions of her brothers' story, eventually collaborating with Laponneraye on the Mémoires that tried to rehabilitate both of them — and in the process, as we've now established at length elsewhere on this blog, sometimes inventing details and sometimes getting things demonstrably wrong about her own testimony.

She compared herself to the mother of the Gracchi: She signed the letter "De Robespierre."

Young's note on her: brief, dry, kind — "poor Charlotte did not return to Arras."

Lebon: Guillotined

After Thermidor, Lebon was recalled and guillotined. Arras was restored to the tranquillity Augustin had spent weeks trying to obtain for it. The petition asking that Augustin be sent to Arras as representative on mission had apparently been delivered on 10 Thermidor. The day he died.

The Pattern / Overview

Looking at the whole list: the people who held — Viennot, Sauli, the citizens of Vesoul, eventually Buissart — were the ones Augustin had done something real for, with his own administrative authority, at actual cost to himself politically. Viennot was defended personally and publicly at a moment when that defense created enemies. The Vesoul citizens got justice when the pressure was all pointing toward denunciation. Sauli was taken seriously as a political interlocutor and treated as an intellectual equal.

The people who folded — Ricord, Boizot, Saliceti, Napoleon in the first instance — were the ones for whom the relationship had been more complicated: mixed with self-interest, or with political calculation, or with the kind of intimacy that could too easily be reframed as manipulation or complicity once the wind changed.

Boizot is the clearest example of the second type. He'd written to La Saudraye calling Augustin irresistible and then burned his effigy while trying to get Viennot to co-sign a letter he'd forged in both their names. Viennot wouldn't sign it and the letter went out with one name.

The relationship between what Augustin actually did for people and how those people responded to his death isn't perfect — nothing in this period is — but it's legible. And it's a more honest memorial than most of what was written about him in either direction.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. Chapter 19 throughout, with endnote sources:

Ricord's proclamation and letter: Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public (Aulard, ed.), vol. 15, p. 721 and 515.

Boizot and Viennot post-Thermidor: Girardot, Le département de la Haute-Saône pendant la Révolution, vol. III, pp. 153, 157, 160.

Bernard de Saintes post-Thermidor statement and Vesoul's reply: Lods, Un Conventionnel en Mission, pp. 258 and 298. [Read directly.]

La Saudraye's fate: Mathiez, "Robespierre Jeune en Franche-Comté." [Now cited directly in Annales, read directly.]

Sauli's fate: Pellet, "La Révolution de Gênes en 1797," in Napoléon, p. 225. (Via Young, not read directly.)

Buissart's fate: Barbier, p. 18. (Via Young, not read directly.)

Charlotte's post-Thermidor fate: Fleischmann, Robespierre et les femmes, p. 269. (Via Young.)

Napoleon's clearing of his name via Barras: Barras, Mémoires, vol. I, p. 310.

Haller's fate: confirmed in Young chapter 19 narrative; Napoleonic employment from same.

Luzzatto, Sergio. Bonbon Robespierre. Translated by me, 2025. ("Only Bonbon" chapter for the Lebon recall timing and miniature guillotines.)

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 20. 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.

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:

I wanna have the analysis of the new album done before the Michigan show. But I have very bad internal motivation and need someone to politely yell at me and kick my ass I to doing it

  Continue reading COMMENT LES EMPIRES TOMBENT : LES LEÇONS QUE L’HISTOIRE NOUS DONNE

Introduction to the Mongol Empire’s Military Campaigns The Mongol Empire, founded by Genghis Khan in the early 13th century, is renowned for its lightning-fast conquests and unparalleled military prowess. The empire’s vast expansion was facilitated by a combination of strategic leadership, disciplined troops, and innovative tactics. This article will examine the key military campaigns and…

This week I spend an ungodly amount of time trying to determine which poison could've been used to kill King Arthur and frame Owain and after coming to a more or less satisfactory result realised that this information does not help me in any way.