#philippe lebas

Augustin and the People Maximilien Loved: A Relationship Map

Thank you for the question!

I have technically already made both a list of Augustin's positive relationships and speculated on relationships with "famous" frev figures, but you bring forth an opportunity for me to focus on more people in the domestic sphere, as well as an opportunity for me to revisit what I've said before! As I alwaaaays say: while history might seem like the sitting bottom half of the hour glass: every falling grain reimagines the landscape and its resting dunes are reshaped by the descent of more context and knowledge.. it's an opportunity for me to refine my answers basically

So!

The short answer to the question is: Augustin's relationship with Maximilien's inner circle was generally warmer than Maximilien's own relationships within it — because Augustin was more personally accessible than his brother, more willing to be easy with people, and less.. frightening to be around. Where Maximilien inspired devotion and awe, Augustin inspired something closer to genuine affection.

The Lebas case is the clearest example but the pattern runs throughout:

Philippe Lebas: Need I say more?

Lebas is Maximilien's closest personal friend. He worships him with a devotion that is, if anything, (almost) even more total than Augustin's — he will eventually die at his own hand rather than survive without him. And yet Lebas's relationship with Augustin is categorically different in register. Where he's formal and shy around Maximilien, unable even to ask him for news of Élisabeth, Augustin he can actually talk to: The letter he wrote to Élisabeth from his sickbed makes the distinction explicit:

"Robespierre [the elder] came one day; he was the only man from whom I could get news of you, but I was unlucky, I did not know how to ask him [...] Robespierre the Younger came to see me. What joy for me! I was more familiar with him. We were the same age."

Same age and more familiar.. These are small words that cover something significant. Maximilien was, again, the object of Lebas's devotion — an elevated, slightly intimidating figure even in domestic contexts. Augustin was his peer. Someone he could actually speak to without performing. Augustin then told him, unprompted, that Élisabeth was the one he liked best of the sisters and that she was cheerful and good — effectively doing the emotional labour of connecting two people who couldn't quite connect themselves. (wingman of the century)

By 9 Thermidor, Lebas ran down to join the Robespierre brothers on the floor of the Convention and demanded his own arrest. He shot himself that night rather than submit. The relationship with both brothers ended the same way because his loyalty ran to the shared project, but it's worth noting that the person he said he could actually talk to in that circle was Augustin.

The Duplay Family: Adopted Warmly, No Strings Attached

The Duplays — the carpenter's family on Rue Saint-Honoré where Maximilien had been lodging since the Champs de Mars massacre — are the centre of Maximilien's domestic world in Paris. His relationship with them is intimate and complicated: Mme Duplay and her eldest daughter Éléonore treat him as 'effectively their property', and Charlotte's relationship with the household deteriorates into open warfare.

Augustin's relationship with the family is straightforwardly warm and without the. uh. possessiveness running in either direction. He described Maurice Duplay as "the most worthy and generous of men," praised Mme Duplay's housekeeping, said he loved the daughters like sisters and that the household recalled "the golden age." Young notes he was "sincere in his expressions of love for them" — meaning this wasn't diplomatic flattery and he meant it

The sharpest illustration of the dynamic difference: when Charlotte cornered Maximilien about Éléonore, demanding he admit whether he meant to marry her, Maximilien tried to deflect by pivoting to Augustin. "You should marry Éléonore," he said. Augustin's reply: "In faith, no!" Two things visible here: Maximilien using him as a shield in a domestic confrontation, and Augustin refusing the role with characteristic directness. He liked the Duplays. He was not going to be managed by them.

Éléonore Duplay: Mutual Fondness, Importantly. No Romantic Tension™

Éléonore — the eldest daughter, widely understood to have been in love with Maximilien — appears almost not at all in relation to Augustin specifically. The "In faith, no!" is about the only direct moment between them I have. Charlotte's memoirs describe Éléonore as treating Maximilien "as their property" in a way that made life difficult for the siblings, but Augustin doesn't seem to have been caught in that dynamic the way Charlotte was: He was warm enough with the household generally that Éléonore had no specific grievance with him, and he didn't love her romantically (Charlotte. Maxime.), and that seems to have been the extent of it.

Élisabeth Duplay (later Lebas): Genuine Warmth, Mutual

Of the Duplay daughters, Augustin was warmest toward Élisabeth — the one who married Lebas. He told Lebas directly that she was cheerful and good and that she was the one he liked best of the sisters. She confirmed the origin of his nickname "Bonbon" in a note she wrote around 1847, fifty years after his death. The fact that she still remembered this specific detail and thought it worth writing down suggests she held memories of him with some care.

She is also the source — via her son Philippe Lebas Jr., and separately via Hamel's account drawing on her testimony — for the Sainte-Amaranthe gaming house anecdote: that Augustin, Simon Duplay, and Jacques Maurice Duplay went one evening to the fashionable (gambling) house on the Rue Vivienne, were "severely criticised" by Maximilien, and did not go back. This is an Élisabeth story about Augustin's social life, not a story about her relationship with him, but the fact that she was the source for it — decades later — suggests a person who remembered him in some detail.

Camille Desmoulins: Coexistence, No Warmth

Camille is Maximilien's oldest friend. They were at Louis-le-Grand together. Maximilien corrected the proofs of the early Vieux Cordelier. The friendship was long, complicated, and ended with Maximilien acquiescing to Camille's arrest and execution.

Augustin's relationship with Camille is much simpler: there doesn't appear to have been one (or atleast from augustins pov, since camille allegedly just starts taking pot shots at him for no reason/j).. What we have is Courtois's note citing a police surveillance document recording Camille's opinion of Augustin — "Ducos' least gesture is an epigram, and the very sound of young Robespierre's voice is foolish... his opinions always came from the throat, never from the head." (Courtois, note in Claretie, Camille Desmoulins et sa femme, p. 458; original police documents now destroyed.) Whether this is verbatim Camille or a surveillance officer's paraphrase isn't fully verifiable given the source chain. But it's consistent with Camille's general dismissiveness about Augustin in his journalism.

Plus: On January 5, Augustin stands up at the Jacobins and calls for both Hébert and Desmoulins to be heard rather than letting the factional war consume the club. This is not exactly support for Camille — but it's an attempt at procedural fairness. Though.. Maximilien immediately shuts him down. Young notes that Mme Sainte-Amaranthe's gaming house was the kind of place where Augustin "and the Dantonists might have passed their spare time" — suggesting overlapping social circles at most. Though, again, nothing suggests genuine warmth in either direction unfortunately.

Saint-Just: Allied, Not Close

Covered at more length in the speculative post, but the summary here: Saint-Just was Maximilien's most trusted political ally. And Augustin's relationship with him was functional and warm enough — they dined together four days before Thermidor, they signed the joint note to Couthon on the night of 9 Thermidor, and Saint-Just had done at least one practical favour for Augustin during the Army of Italy period. But no documents show personal friendship. The relationship was structural — both were committed to Maximilien's project, both ended up on the same side at the end — without the ease and familiarity that characterized Augustin's relationship with Lebas.

Couthon: Collegial, With Occasional Friction

Couthon was Maximilien's other close Committee ally — generally in agreement on religious policy and the broad direction of the Terror. Augustin corresponded with him during the Alpes-Maritimes mission on army matters and seems to have trusted him as a channel to the Committee. There's no documented personal warmth beyond collegial cooperation.

The friction that exists is mostly structural: Couthon signed things Augustin didn't want signed, as Young notes — he (Couthon) was capable of independent positions within the Robespierrist bloc. And Charlotte's account of taking Gaillard to Couthon's apartment in May 1794 shows a moment where Couthon nearly had him arrested, only stopped by Charlotte physically intervening. That's more about Charlotte than Augustin, but it shows the limits of easy access within that circle.

On 9 Thermidor, Augustin sent a note to Couthon from the Hôtel de Ville that Young considers one of the more touching documents of the whole crisis: "Couthon, all the patriots are in irons. The people must be appealed to." He signed it alongside Maximilien and Saint-Just. By that point the distinctions between Maximilien's people had largely collapsed into shared peril.

TL;DR

Looking at all of this together: Augustin was consistently warmer and more accessible than Maximilien within Maximilien's own circle. The people who were intimidated by Maximilien or locked into complicated dynamics with him — Lebas, the Duplay daughters, even Charlotte in her better moments — found Augustin easier to be around. He was the person who translated between Maximilien and the world, who told Lebas that Élisabeth was cheerful and good, who described the Duplays as the golden age while not pretending he wanted to marry into them.

What he was not was intimately connected to Maximilien's ideological allies. Saint-Just and Couthon are people he worked alongside. Camille Desmoulins is someone he coexisted with at a distance. The people Augustin was actually close to — Lebas, Élisabeth Duplay, the Vesoul circle, Sauli, Buissart — tended to be people Maximilien had some connection to but wasn't specifically closest to. The orbit worked that way: Maximilien had his inner ring, and Augustin moved comfortably through a slightly outer ring that overlapped with it.

Sources:

Young, Mary. Augustin: The Younger Robespierre. London: Core Publications, 2011. (The Lebas illness and letter, chapter 8; the Éléonore marriage refusal, chapter 8; the Duplay household chapters 8 and 9; the Thermidor passages, chapter 19.)

anotherhumaninthisworld 's compilations

Claretie, Jules. Camille Desmoulins et sa femme. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1876/1878. p. 458 — the Courtois note (citing Archives of the Prefecture of Police, unpublished and destroyed documents) on Desmoulins's opinion of Augustin.

Augustin's note to Couthon, 9 Thermidor, cited in Young chapter 19.

Your sacrifice is not forgotten even today. Your love for la Patrie and your principled life can be an example to all. You were and are forever a good patriot, a reliable friend, a brother, and above all, an honest man.

What can I wish for you in the afterlife? The best that we all wish for. Justice and understanding from those who judge us today.

Salut et fraternité, mon ami.

Le Bas uses the “vous” to address Robespierre while Saint-Just uses the “tu” in the same letter.

Session of 9 thermidor, as reported in the journal Le Républicain français, number 614 (July 30 1794)

There is another measure to be taken. There exists in Paris a class of individuals who, despite the weakness of their sex, do a lot of harm to the Republic. They corrupt your young men; and instead of making them vigorous and worthy of the ancient Spartans, they only make them into Sibarites incapable of serving liberty: I am talking about these immodest women who make a shameful trafficking of their charms. It is a plague on society, and any good government should banish it from its midst. I ask that the Committee of Public Safety examine whether it would not be useful to stifle this germ of counter-revolution, by deporting these women of bad habits beyond the seas (applauds). Jean-Bon-Saint-André at the Convention, September 5 1793

In effect, how should one esteem a woman (Madame Ricord) who knows so little of the rules of propriety and her duties as a wife to commit the gravest offenses against them? How should I have loved a person who continually compromised my younger brother with her advances, to which he believed it essential to his honor and duty not to respond?  Charlotte Robespierre’s memoirs (1834) 

[Albertine Marat] mentioned Charlotte Corday to me in passing, describing her as an adventuress and a woman of ill repute. Oeuvres d'Alphonse Esquiros, député des Bouches-du-Rhône, Histoire des Montagnards (1875), page 5. Section titled ”my witnesses.”