Saint-Just’s flight to Paris

obscurehistoricalinterests:

As translated by yours truly from Jörg Monar’s German biography of him:

In the night between 15-16 September 1786 he left in all secrecy the house of his mother, not before packing several pieces of the family’s silverware and a pair of gold-inlaid pistols which had belonged to his late father. The fact that he chose that particular date to flee - Friday night - shows that he knew exactly where he wanted to go, because every Saturday at 13:00 a post carriage to Paris left from the little village of Chauny, located 15 kilometers north of Blérancourt. As mentioned before, carriages to Paris were going regularly from Soissons as well, but Soissons was not only farther away, but the carriages would leave the city very early, which meant that he had to leave Blérancourt in the early evening, which the family would have noticed immediately. 

That he had chosen Paris as the destination of his adventurous escape cannot be a surprise. In all the kingdom there was no other city which could attract with so many options a young runaway. However, it was obviously clear to the young Louis-Antoine that his Paris adventure would be tied to great costs, otherwise he would not have loaded himself so much with valuables. 

After traveling on the the approx. 120 kilometers-long country road in the slow carriage, Saint-Just arrived probably in the early hours of the evening of 16 September in the big city. He obtained a furnished room in the Saint-Louis Hotel, close to the Palais Royal, on Rue Fromenteau. For this provincial young man, always raised in a clean environment, this room would have been a first dampener on his enthusiasm at his arrival in the capital, as Mercier, whom we have to thank for the most lifelike depiction of pre-revolutionary Paris, does not paint this kind of lodging in the most flattering light in his “Tableau de Paris”:

The furnished rooms are filthy. Nothing affects a poor stranger more than seeing the dirty beds, the windows through which all the winds pass through, the half-rotten tapestries, a staircase covered in garbage. (…) An Englishman and a Dutchman, who have enjoyed the most delectable property, found themselves sleeping in beds infested by uncomfortable animals. And all the nasty drafts entered their room.

Mercier also mentions that one had to pay for this room in the near of the Palais Royal usually six times more than everywhere else, for a rent that was normally already too high, so the inexperienced Saint-Just became immediately the victim of a sort of trap for foreigners. He therefore saw himself forced to sell almost all the silver he brought to a Jewish pawnbroker, who also took advantage of Saint-Just’s inexperience and gave him only 200 francs for it. The only things Saint-Just did not sell were a silver cup with the sigil of his father, a ring and the two pistols - obviously mementos of his father.

Other interesting bits from the chapter:

  • Monar examines life in the city for someone on a budget (like Saint-Just) and determines that it must have been really difficult for someone like him to even get a decent meal. Restaurants were too expensive and the cheap buffets were so overtaken with aggressive people that someone well-mannered and inexperienced like Antoine would have probably not had the chance to eat a good meal there.
  • Saint-Just’s explanation to his mother for his flight to Paris? He wrote a letter pretending to be a doctor by the name of Richardet and claimed that poor Saint-Just he went to Paris to treat himself of a sleep disturbance yet unknown in the medical world (!), taking the family silver with him to pay for the treatment. He did not tell anyone because he did not want to scare his mother. Hilariously, the “doctor” advises Madame Saint-Just to not let her son work for a couple of months, and that for three months she should feed him only with milk and vegetables, dissuade him from studying, because “if he continues, he only has one year to live.” 
  • Two weeks later, at nine o’clock in the morning, Saint-Just receives a very unpleasant surprise, as he is arrested and questioned by a police Commisioner Chenu. He answered the questions regarding his identity correctly at first, but then started to lie about why he came to Paris, claiming that he went there at the behest of his mother. He claimed to have answered everything truthfully, but at the end refused to sign the  procès-verbal. He was clearly very surprised by his arrest, otherwise he would have presented a more consistent version of the story.
  • As he was locked away in the House of Madame de Sainte-Colombe, his living situations were not too bad. His mother paid so that he would have powder and pomade for his toilette, and a servant would serve his meals.
  • There were, however, people locked there for reasons much more serious and disturbing than running away from home - depression, suicide attempts, mentally ill people, thieves. For someone as carefully-raised and educated as Saint-Just, it must have been a highly unsettling company.
  • There was a flourishing black market in the house, and Madame Saint-Just despaired that her son kept trading his clothes away. Monar theorizes that Antoine probably traded his shirts for books, to pass the time.

antisilver:

“ On the day when I am convinced that it is impossible to give the French people gentle morals, energetic, sensible and inexorable towards tyranny and injustice, I shall stab myself.“  ( Saint-Just, Fragments on the  Republican Institutions)

typical Saint-Just quote ;D

draw with photo ref

dailypointdujour:

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À l'ouverture de la séance, M. Chapellier, en quittant la place président, a fait un discours dans lequel il a parlé de l'arrêté de la nuit du 4, comme d'un grand pacte de famille formé au milieu des oranges de la liberté.

M. De Clermont-Tonnerre, élu à sa place, a été aussi simple de modeste dans sa réponse; il a dit, entre autres choses, que si son élection lui imposait de grand devoirs, ses prédécesseurs lui avaient donné de grands exemples.

Il a ensuite fait part à l'assemblée de plusieurs déclarations ou ordonnances du roi, qui lui avaient été adressées par M. le garde-des-seaux; une du 10 de ce mois, pour le rétablissement de l'ordre dans le royaume; la seconde, pour enjoindre aux troupes de donner main-forte aux milices bourgeoises, et prêter serment en présence des officiers civils ou municipaux; une autre, du 14, portant amnistie pour les déserteurs de terre et de mer, à condition qu'ils seront rentrés sous leurs drapeaux, d'ici au premier octobre prochain; une enfin pour la délivrance des prisonniers pour fait de chasse. On lui a lu ensuite une lettre du roi aux officiers & soldats de son armée, dans laquelle sa majesté leur déclare qu'elle ne veut jamais employer les troupes que pour maintenir les lois, protéger ses sujets, et qu'elle désirait améliorer le fort de l'armée.

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cryptotheism:

prospitianescapee:

This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”

Now this is a fucking post

orpheusmori:

Saint-Just Resources

A culmination of the many articles and other resources I use in my own research as someone studying to be a historian on the revolution. Will be added to as I progress in my research; please let me know if any links don’t work!

Historians on Saint-Just:

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dailypointdujour:

Hello!

My current focus revolves around Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, whose role is often reduced as being part of the Thermidorian reaction. I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of our community are unaware of his significant contribution during the early times of the Revolution: a newspaper called “Le Point du Jour.” What makes this noteworthy is that Barère wrote down daily summaries of the discussions held in the Constituent Assembly. This allowed anyone, whether in Paris or the provinces, to stay informed about ongoing discussions at the Assembly.

The objectives of my transcription project are two-fold:

  1. To deepen my understanding of the French Revolution, particularly during the era of the Assemblée Constitutionnelle;
  2. To bring greater recognition to the contributions of Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac.

It’s important to mention that I receive assistance from two sources.

  • @orpheusmori helps me when the quality of the text make it hard to decipher the text.
  • Peter McPhee, historian who encouraged me to start this project, to clarify the meanings of certain words and to improve my understanding of some context. If these explanations appear interesting to other people, I may choose to include them at the end of each daily entry.

Thank you for reading.

- An

saintjustitude:

Reminder that:

  • Barère is a liar who is known to deform or embellish truth in his memoirs (published in 1842, the year after his death). They are “faithful” in regards to Hippolyte Carnot copying his notes faithfully - he does correct some of his mistakes, though not all obviously. (Either because he doesn’t have the facts or, well, he’s biased too.)
  • Prieur’s notes on the CSP also seem to be what he wrote himself. (I have not found a date for his notes but they were published by Georges Bouchard in 1946. He seems to have had a manuscript. I don’t know if it still exists. It’s possible it circulated the same way Élisabeth Duplay-Le Bas’ notes, testimony and manuscript circulated.)
  • Other sources for Prieur’s testimony are via Hippolyte Carnot in both his father’s and Barère’s memoirs.
  • Carnot’s memoirs cannot be used to confirm much in regards to Barère’s and Prieur’s narratives as they’re the least faithful, understandably: they were written by his son, who was born in 1801, and was only 22yo when his father died in 1823. That means he might not even have told him all THAT much about his past (predating Hippolyte’s birth by ~7 years!) which might be why he’s compensating with Barère’s and Prieur’s notes (and shoving many other notes and testimonies in there too, such as Expert’s, Barère’s friend, which he got in the same package of notes as Barère’s).
  • Most importantly: Carnot’s memoirs were published in 1861-63. That’s 38-40 years after Carnot’s death, 29-31 years after Prieur’s and 20-22 years after Barère’s.

My point is that there’s obvious cross-contamination between those testimonies.

Carnot’s memoirs can at best be used to show where there might be contradictions with other narratives. They’re most useful to know Hippolyte’s perception and interpretation, and they’re an indirect source of Prieur’s words, which is still less reliable than his actual text (because I have no idea if Hippolyte is quoting notes or just remembering things Prieur told him - which would be at least 30 years earlier if not more).

Barère and Prieur sometimes confirm each other’s testimonies but that’s not a 100% proof of truth either.

I can’t confirm it, but it’s very possible that Prieur relied on Barère to protect him after Thermidor. He wasn’t 31 yet when Thermidor happened, and we know he was shy and not much of an orator. (Also, he has nothing but praise for Barère in his various testimonies.) It would help if I could manage to read his speech on 3 germinal Year III briefly quoted by Mathiez because I could compare their versions of one (two?) events more closely to know if they match or not:

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It’s also more than likely that they all - meaning Barère, Billaud, Collot, Prieur, Carnot and Lindet - tried to agree on a version to sell the Convention, increasingly full of vengeful Dantonistes and Girondins and other opportunistic reactionaries, to whitewash themselves while blaming everything on “The Trumvirate”. (Because they called them out on their bullshit very early on: “how could the three overrule your decisions when there were six of you… and one of them left for 40 days… and another was often sick… and the last had spent so much time on missions?”) And still there are multiple cracks in their stories.

Also I will never believe they never originally agreed with the Law of Prairial or the Police Bureau. There is no way Robespierre and Couthon could have passed it without their approval. They had just requested Saint-Just’s return from mission to help them, and Collot had also almost been assassinated; it wasn’t just Robespierre. He was likely just as freaked out as Robespierre. That Robespierre wrote the letter to recall him is a convenient excuse to blame it all on him (something Barère says later in Year III). They cosigned it:

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(I assume Collot didn’t because he was having a crisis at home. Or recovering? Did he actually get wounded? This post is already getting very long and I don’t feel like looking that one bit up.)

Moreover, there’s an official letter to Guyton-Morveau from the CSP, handwritten by Prieur and cosigned by Robespierre, Carnot and Billaud, which mentions his recall:

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They agreed to Saint-Just coming back. They agreed they needed him. And what they needed him for is, given the timing, clearly what became the Law of Prairial. If anything, the only one who might have disagreed with the Law of Prairial that we have circumstantial evidence for is Saint-Just. (Not just via Gateau saying he disapproved but because he abruptly returned on mission when/before it was read, and this kind of report is what they usually tasked Saint-Just with, not Couthon.)

As for the Police Bureau, they insist (Prieur first) they’ve “never” signed any arrest themselves, only cosigned those written by Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just that they forced or tricked them to sign, which is a blatant lie:

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Hey would you look at that, Prieur? Looks like you didn’t need any member of “The Triumvirate” to make you sign arrests in early July with Billaud and Barère. Even though you were reportedly “trembling with fear” about the Evil Tyrants then. Huh. How odd. (And it likely emanates from Barère because most of the time the first person who signs is the one who wrote it and it’s about workers at a printing press in the Louvre and that would fall under Barère’s attributions.)

(I’d have to study Saint-Just’s speech on the police that led to the creation of the Bureau more in depth but much like the Law of Prairial, I highly doubt it wasn’t done without their approval. They were all seeking to concentrate more and more power - Carnot abolished the ministries and replaced them with commissions subordinated to the CSP.)

commiecamille:

commiecamille:

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

So, yesterday I finished Colin Jones’ The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris. Ultimately, I greatly enjoyed the book, and was really enamoured with the way the novel literally moves hour-by-hour, place-by-place throughout the day of 9 Thermidor, 1794. I wanted to talk a little bit about the book, and thought I’d share some of my key takeaways from the experience!

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bump bc i’ve seen people wanting to read it!