#and then he introduces robespierre

[lanterne]

Grey history is so good y'all

[makiitabaki]

Being a Polish frev fan is really weird because you see people arguing about Robespierre in some film all of the time but then you look into it and think: 'Hello, Mr. Andrzej.'

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

I found the Charlotte Robespierre-pins-down-Couthon-in-an-armchair-and-calls-him-a-hypocrite anecdote in its full glory within La Révolution, la Terreur, le Directoire 1791-1799: d’après les mémoires de Gaillard (1908) page 263-272. The table of contents claim this event happened in May 1794.

-

Gaillard therefore presents himself at Mlle Robespierre's house, she welcomes him in a friendly manner, she does not seek to know the political opinions of her visitor; both talk for a long time about her family and their old acquaintances, she names for Gaillard, with great bitterness, the prodigious number of very honest people dragged to the scaffold by Joseph Lebon; she makes him tell her how he was able to save himself at least from prison and tells him how much pleasure she and her older brother felt in receiving news of him from their younger brother; then Gaillard explains to her the embarrassment he finds himself in and asks her to help him with her advice to save the magistrates of Melun and the signatories of the address to Louis XVI.

”When my younger brother passed through Melun,” said Mlle Robespierre, ”all three of us were living together; I still hoped to be able to bring back the older, to snatch him from the wretches who obsess over him and lead him to the scaffold. They felt that my brother would eventually escape them if I regained his confidence, they destroyed me entirely in his mind; today he hates the sister who served as his mother… For several months he has been living alone, and although lodged in the same house, I no longer have the power to approach him… I loved him tenderly, I still do… His excesses are the consequence of the domination under which he groans, I am sure of it, but knowing no way to break the yoke he has allowed himself to be placed under, and no longer able to bear the pain and the shame of to see my brother devote his name to general execration, I ardently desire his death as well as mine. Judge of my unhappiness!… But let’s return to what interests you. The addresses to the king on the events of 1792 are already far from us; it seems to me that the signatures of these addresses are persecuted less than those who protested against the day of May 31. Try to see Maximilien, you will be content; he was very glad that our younger brother saw you at Melun. On this occasion he spoke with interest of the exercises of your pupils and of the attention you had in entrusting him with presiding over them. I won’t introduce you to him, I would not succeed; I even advise you not to speak to him about me. You will be told he is out, don't believe it, insist on your visit.”

The Robespierre family was housed on rue Saint-Honoré, near the Assomption chapel, the sister and younger brother at the front, the older brother at the back of the courtyard. Gaillard went to Maximilien’s apartment; a young man, looking at him with the most insolent air, said to him, barely having opened the door: “The representative isn’t home…”

“He may not be there for those who come to talk to him about business, but that is not my doing; I will talk to him about his family that I know a lot, you have seen me come out of his sister's apartment who is involved in state affairs no more than I am... Bring my name to the representative, he will receive me, I’m sure of it.”

The fellow did not dare refuse to carry a paper on which Gaillard had taken care to indicate himself in such a way as to be recognized, he immediately came back and gave the visitor his paper saying: “The representative does not know you,” and the door was violently slammed shut!…

The insolence of this brazen man whom Gaillard knew to be the secretary of Robespierre, son of Duplay, to whom the sister attributed the excesses of his brother, the sorrow he felt at losing the hope of saving the judges of Melun and to ensure his personal rest, all these thoughts made him very angry; he calls the young man a liar, insolent, he accuses him of deceiving Robespierre and of increasing the number of his enemies every day, all this in the loudest voice with the intention of being heard by Maximilien and lure him to one of the windows where, surely, he would have recognized him. New disappointment, no one appears and Gaillard goes back to tell Mlle Robespierre about his misadventure.

“I prepared you for it, she told him. ”No one can approach my brother unless he is a friend of those Duplays, with whom we are lodging; these wretches have neither intelligence nor education, explain to me their ascendancy over Maximilien. However, I do not despair of breaking the spell that holds him under their yoke; for that I am awaiting the return of my other brother, who has the right to see Maximilien. If the discovery I just made doesn't rid us of this race of vipers forever, my family is forever lost. You know what a miserable state we found ourselves in, reduced to alms, my brothers and I, if the sister of our father hadn’t taken us in. It’s strange that you didn’t often notice how much her husband’s brusqueness and formality made us pay dearly for the bread he gave us; but you must also have noticed that if indigence saddened us, it never degraded us and you always judged us incapable of containing money through a dubious action. Maximilien, who makes me so unhappy, has never given a hold, as you know, in terms of delicacy. Imagiene his fury when he learns that these miserable Duplays are using his name and his credit to get themselves the rarest goods at a low price from the merchants. So while all of Paris is forced to line up at the baker's shop every morning to get a few ounces of black, disgusting bread, the Duplays eat very good bread because the Incorruptible sits at their table: the same pretext provides them with sugar, oil, soap of the best quality, which the inhabitant of Paris would seek in vain in the best shops... How my brother's pride would be humiliated if he knew the abuse that these wretches make of his name! What would become of his popularity, even among his most ardent supporters? Certainly my brother is very proud, it is in him a capital fault; you must remember, you and I have often lamented the ridicule he made for himself by his vanity, the great number of enemies he made for himself by his disdainful and contemptuous tone, but he is not bloodthirsty. Certainly he believes he can overthrow his adversaries and his enemies by the superiority of his talent.”

The tenderness of this unfortunate girl for her brother was therefore very keen and very blind, she forgot that, a few moments before, she had told Gaillard, with the accent of despair and with eyes filled with tears, that death would seem preferable to the pain of seeing Maximilien dedicate his name to public execration, and yet her brother for his part had devoted mortal hatred to her since the trip she had made to Arras to collect evidence of the massacres carried out by Joseph Lebon.

“In the absence of my brother,” said Mlle Robespierre to Gaillard, would you like to try to see Couthon? He prides himself on being good for me, I will ask him to receive you, he will not refuse me, I will precede you by a quarter of an hour, he will give the order to let you in and we will exit together.”

Gaillard gratefully accepts, takes the address of Couthon who lived at n. 97 of the Cour du Manège, today rue de Rivoli, near rue du 29 Juilliet, and the next morning arrives at the indicated time.

Couthon, whose face was truly angelic, wore a white dressing gown. A child of five or six years old, beautiful as Love, was between his father's legs; he had a young white rabbit in his arms which he was feeding alfalfa. Mme Couthon and Mlle Robespierre stood in the embrasure of a window overlooking the Tuileries.

“You (vous) are,” said Couthon to Gaillard, a friend of Mlle Robespierre, you therefore have every kind of right to my interest, tell me, citizen, how can I be of use to you?”

The fine face, the entourage of innocence, the tone, the manners of good company, this care not to use tutoient when everyone else did so, convinced Gaillard that the slander had attached itself in particular to the person of this worthy M. Couthon, he promises to undeceive all those with whom the deputy had relations.

“Citizen representative, one of your colleagues, Maure, deputy for Yonne, had recalled the former judges, all very honest people, to the courts of Melun, and everyone applauded this act of justice. The popular society was offended by this, it threatened Maure that it was going to denounce him to the Convention as a supporter of Louis XVI and his family, given that these judges had adhered to the address by which the directorate of the department complained of the outrages committed against the king on the day of June 20 1792. The next day your colleague issued a decree dismissing these judges who were not yet installed, and ordered the revolutionary committee to incarcerate them. Can you please tell me by which means these unfortunate judges can escape this act of severity?”

“Admit, citizen,” answered Couthon, “that the Convention is indeed to be pitied for being forced to send as commissioners to the departments a crowd of imbeciles who make it hated and who compromise liberty... Maure doesn’t have the strength to understand that true patriots were saddened and rightly outraged by this fatal day of June 20. The aristocrats, as one said then, were delighted by it, the crimes of the people seemed to them a means of forever losing liberty and reestablishing despotism... It was a duty to rise up against the violation of the home of the first official of the the State and the bloody outrages to which it was subjected that day. I signed an address in which our indignation was expressed in the most energetic terms and I am far from repenting of it. Have the judges you are talking to me about been arrested?”

“No, citizen.”

”That’s what I suspected, they will have been warned; in fact, one is not going to prison automatically, one will have their homes sealed and perhaps not be very eager to arrest them?… Can you assure me, citizen, that these judges are honest men?”

”The most honest people in the country!”

”Well, on reflection, I was going to give you bad advice... based on the distance from Melun to Paris, this is where they will come to hide, one will find them, there is no safety in the prisons of Paris. They'd better go home, they shall be given a guard, they won't even be incarcerated... but once again, how can it be made a crime to have signed these addresses?”

“Citizen,” continues Gaillard, with great emotion, you are convinced that the signatures of these addresses have not committed a crime, you are all-powerful in the Committee of Public Safety where your opinion always prevails. Today, seventy unfortunate people are being led to the scaffold, their condemnation based on nothing other than the signing of these addresses…”

Couthon's face changed, he suddenly takes on the tiger's mask, makes a movement to grab the bell pull... Mlle Robespierre rushes at him to stop him (he was paralyzed from the legs down), turns towards Gaillard and says to him: “Save yourself!” In the confusion into which all this throws him, Gaillard takes Couthon's hat, she notices it, warns him, he runs across the apartment and reaches the stairs. He had barely gone down eight or ten steps when he heard Mlle Robespierre shouting to him: “Go and wait for me at the Orangerie.” (The courtyard of the Orangerie was located at the end of the Terrace des Feuillants where Rue de Rivoli now meets Place de la Concorde).

When Gaillard was able to think, he wondered why the various sentries posted along the Feuillants terrace had not stopped him. A glance in a mirror while picking up his hat in Couthon's salon had told him how altered his face was. Even after leaving the deputy, he did not think he was safe, he did not take four strides without wondering if he was being pursued. He has barely gone down into the courtyard of the Orangery when he goes back up onto the terrace, looking anxiously to see if his good angel was arriving. As soon as he sees her, he runs towards her, loudly asking her five or six questions at the same time without paying attention to the crowd around them. Mlle Robespierre, calmer, tells him in a low voice that she will answer him when they have reached the Place de la Révolution.

“Explain to me, please,” said Gaillard to Mlle Robespierre as soon as they were offshore, ”your haste to tell me to take flight flee and why you held back Couthon in his chair?”

“You were fooled, my dear monsieur, by the profound hypocrisy of Couthon, I was completely fooled myself; I believed your judges saved and you forever at peace like all the signatories of these addresses to Louis XVI... Couthon only showed himself to be so good-natured in order to get to know the depths of your thoughts, you fell into his trap, I could not have avoided it more than you. Your bloody and so justly deserved reproach regarding the 63 victims of today struck in the hearth, my presence, even my confidence could not have stopped his vengeance. The members of the Committee of Public Safety each have five or six men at home who are resolute at their command, because they are constantly trembling. Had he reached the bell pull, this very afternoon you would have been placed in the tumbril alongside the 63 unfortunate people you wanted to save... Fortunately, I succeeded in making him ashamed of the crime he was going to commit by immolating a friend that I had brought to his house... Will he keep his word to me? I followed your conversation very attentively, you did not say a word from which Couthon could conclude that you do not live in Paris... Return home quickly, do not follow the ordinary route out of fear that, remembering the name of the city where your judges were to sit, he sends for men to follow you on the road to Melun.” (1)

Mlle Robespierre barely gives her protégé time to thank her and does not want him to accompany her back to her house. Gaillard leaves immediately without seeing his sister or the two dismissed judges, who have taken refuge in Paris.

(1) The story of Gaillard's visit to Couthon is reproduced almost word for word by M. Lenôtre, in his Paris révolutionnaire, vielles maisons, vieux papiers, 1900, La Brouette de Couthon, p. 279.* Mr. Lenôtre draws his story from the collection of Victorien Sardou's autographs. The note appearing among these authographs which speaks of Couthon comes from Fouché's papers: it is in fact Gaillard who, at the request of his friend Fouché, recorded in writing for him the narration of his interview with Couthon. Gaillard took pleasure in often recounting to the people with whom he was in contact this scene of which he had always retained such a terrifying impression of; this is the reason why it appears today in his memoirs.

*Worth noting is that Charlotte’s identitity is kept a secret in this account, she’s simply described as ”a lady.” This account also includes the detail of Couthon’s son starting to cry and the bunny he was holding getting pushed to the floor once his father gets mad.

[nesiacha]

do you have some good sources about how women during the frev thought about universal male suffrage? (i've been uncomfortable with some claims about how the frev was not feminist enough because women got the rights to vote in the 20th century, but cannot back up this discomfort.)

"I am quite limited on certain subjects and this is one of them (I am currently researching the exact thoughts of women during the French Revolution on universal suffrage).

Unfortunately, it has been a great shame that the French Revolution was misogynistic despite the meager rights that were gradually taken away from them over time. Even the greatest progressives like Sylvain Maréchal, who was an important disciple of Babeuf, had as a project to ensure that women did not have a say in the learning of reading.

The fact that misogyny was already present during the Ancien Régime (Marie Antoinette is blamed for all evils when in reality she did not have much say during her husband's reign, to better absolve Louis XVI and the policy of France under this absolute regime) or that Napoleon made the condition of women worse than that of Italy or Spain (I mentioned this in my post 'Women's Rights Suppressed') while being a great hypocrite does not absolve the revolutionaries for what they did in their misogyny.

There was a habit of attacking the wives of their adversaries to better discredit them (like Manon Roland, Marie Françoise Goupil, wife of Hébert, Lucile Duplessis, wife of Desmoulins), which is an interesting parallel on this point with the attacks against Marie Antoinette.

Olympe de Gouges spoke about the rights of women and citizens. Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe, who demanded the right to organize in the national army. Théroigne de Méricourt, Louis Reine Audu, and again Claire Lacombe fought in the Tuileries and yet, despite being rewarded with a civic crown, they would not have the right to speak on universal suffrage.

Chaumette was a great misogynist, Robespierre too (one could tell me that he supported Louise de Keralio's candidacy for her entry into the academy, but in political matters, it was another story), Danton, Sylvain Maréchal, Amar, etc. I am not here to blame Robespierre and I deplore that there is a black legend about him, but one can see a certain purely political gesture in my opinion for the action he will take towards Simone Evrard.

As much as Simone Evrard is a very intelligent woman, with an extraordinary destiny very underestimated, capable of making very good political speeches (one of the people of the French Revolution that I admire the most), I wonder if the fact that Robespierre personally introduced her into the Assembly was just an opportunistic gesture because he would have had an additional reason to discredit Jacques Roux and Théophile Leclerc thanks to the speech she made while he was among the revolutionaries who approved the restriction of women's rights. Respect towards Simone Evrard regarding her dignity and intelligence (maybe even surely) opportunism, I would be tempted to answer on this by affirmative.

Risking repeating myself, Napoleon being a greater oppressor towards women by taking away the few rights they had, enacting oppressive and hypocritical laws, and even bloody ones concerning them, does not absolve the other revolutionaries of their sexism.

And there is no excuse that it was of their time (in fact, I noticed that this lie is used in my opinion to absolve Napoleon but not the revolutionaries, but forced to see that it fits into the same idea)... First of all, Charles Gilbert Romme was more progressive in women's rights, Marat and Charlier too, Camille Desmoulins thought that women could have the right to vote, Condorcet demanded gender equality, Carnot worked with him in women education with Pastoret and Guilloud , Guyomar opposed the exclusion of women from universal suffrage. Worse than anything, while the clubs and societies of women ended up being banned, which is a regression.

In 1795, for attempting to revolt against the Assembly which abolished the social policies of the Montagnards, they were prohibited from attending assemblies and even from gathering in the streets in groups of more than 5. Moreover, the term 'tricoteuse' to insult women was not invented during the Napoleonic era or the royalist era but in 1795.

What did women think about this? This is where I am quite limited because besides the answers I have given about these women and their actions, unfortunately, there is not much else I can say due to my limited knowledge.

In any case, I hope I have helped a bit to support the aforementioned statements.

In the meantime, I can provide some of my sources: the historian Mathilde Larrère, Antoine Resche who made very good summarized portraits of some revolutionary women on the website 'veni vidi sensi', I would also recommend reading the book by the writer Claude Guillon on Robespierre, women, and the Revolution (even though I completely disagree with some of his books that have been legally condemned, this one is rather good and he had a quite good blog on the French Revolution that I recommend checking out), and the historian Jean-Clément Martin, 'La révolte brisée'."

Reedit: Thank you to aedesluminis for inform me the role that Carnot Pastoret and Guilloud did with women's education.

[napoleondidthat]

I Went, I Saw, I’m Back….

Today was Napoleon movie day and I lived to come back and report.

You know how you go into a movie with super high expectations when you have heard it’s the best thing ever, then inevitably find it less than you expected? The reverse happened a bit for me, everyone had hated this so my expectations were low, and though the movie is problematic, because everyone I read was losing their minds, it wasn’t that bad.

That is not to say it was good.

So for me it’s a mixed bag of stuff. Things I liked and and things I did not.

The main problem with the movie is that it tries to fit everything in it and therefore nothing works because everything is trying to be in there. Since they try to cover everything, nothing is covered and everything suffers, including the flow of the movie. It’s one of the movies that I felt like I could see what they were trying to do, and maybe it would have worked if they didn’t slam everything in there.

So this is going to be a bit scattered because my thoughts are scattered. And warning: spoilers will be discussed.

I wish they would have just skipped the French Revolution altogether and assumed the audience had a working knowledge of it. Shoehorning it in didn’t work. We have a brief scene of Marie Antoinette running the halls with her children trying to escape arrest to then a fade out of her execution. Yes, it’s all wrong, she is too defiant, her hair is too long, her dress is wrong. I get what they are going for here and a defiant Queen is probably a bit more dramatic than one who apologizes to her executioner for stepping his his shoes. Napoleon in the crowd, even though he wasn’t really there, works in the dramatic licensing department and his reaction was actually good.

Then we are whisked to Napoleon getting into a meeting with Barras, who acts as a sort of a narrator to the audience to catch them up on the state of things and Toulon. What I dislike in this film is that they introduce the characters by flashing their names and titles on screen. Ugh. I do not like this. Napoleon gives his plans on what he’d do with Toulon and Lucien (he’s been mistaken as Joseph in some reviews) acts as interpreter to Barras over what Napoleon just said (What my brother is saying….) .

There is a bit of time spent at Toulon with Napoleon walking around the place and even melting cannons for new cannons. The British are brutes who yell at him calling him a “shitbag” and yelling at the locals to move their “fucking goats!” . No, they really had wandering goats.

The battle is intense. Now, I know a lot of complaints have been filed due to battle inaccuracies and too few of them. This isn’t a problem for me. I am not a scholar on Napoleonic warfare. I am a wimp when it comes to blood and gore. I dislike seeing people blown up but even hate seeing horses blown up more. So one of the first casualties of Toulon is Napoleon’s beautiful white innocent horse. It takes a cannon ball to the chest and it’s graphic and it makes me want to do a cry. The horse falls and Napoleon is thrown but regains his composure to go fight with one on one with some a combatant until someone else decapitates the guy with a sword.

One battle down more to go.

Barras magically is on scene to literally crown Napoleon general with a sword like the Queen knights people. Napoleon wanders away to his poor dead horse and fished out the ball lodged in the chest and hands it off to I think Junot with instructions to give it to someone. I thought I heard “for mother” but that can’t be it….can it?

Now we are back to revolution stuff and Robespierre is being denounced. Why are we putting this in here? It’s too…whatever. He runs out of the chamber, tries to shoot himself when he can’t shoot the chamber and of course just ends up wounding himself in his jaw. Barras pops over to put his finger in the wound (ew sir) and tells him he missed and off to the guillotine for you “dear friend”.

Enter Josephine. She escapes her prison in her dramatic cloak where she is hugged by a nameless woman.

Enter Napoleon being instructed by Barras on the civilians uprising. There is a scene of Napoleon wandering through a crowd of citizens shouting long live the King. Napoleon places his cannon, the citizens line up and then boom! More bloodshed for everyone. People are mowed down, blood spray. The back crowd runs off and the camera pans to a woman trying to crawl away with her severed foot in the street. No horses dead thankfully.

Back to Josephine in her cloak walking empty Paris streets and looking at various overturned debris. Is she just walking the streets for days? Is she coming upon the whiff of grapeshot? We don’t know.

Napoleon is now wandering around a Survivor’s ball. The lighting is gorgeous in here. Josephine has ditched her cloak for a dress her boob might escape from at any moment. She’s sitting with Barras with her insane asylum haircut and red long gloves and red ribbon neck decoration. Napoleon looks bored. Later Napoleon is still wandering around and Josephine is hanging out gambling. She notices Napoleon starring at her and confronts him. Here we meet Josephine with her dramatic British accent and Napoleon’s awkward American one (but it strangely fits all the same). She asks why he was starting and there is some back and forth but no lines from the trailer with her “has the course of my life change Napoleon?” Instead Napoleon tells her not to tell him her name and she stares at him and wanders off to gamble some more I guess. What?

Next is the scene with a very small Eugene doing the probably made up Napoleon myth scene of “Can I have my father’s sword please sir?” Napoleon and Junot have been throwing shit at the wall before this for…reasons. Napoleon explains to Eugene that he can’t give back the sword because citizens can’t have weapons. The boy says it’s a rememberance of his dead father. Napoleon asks what he is doing there and the boy says his mother said that Napoleon could. Napoleon then goes to a room with loads of swords that were taken from the executed officers. Napoleon asks if anyone thought to put names to them but no, they did not. Napoleon grabs a random sword and heads to chez Beauharnais. There everyone seems to know him, including the help, and he gives the maybe sword back to Eugene. Everyone thanks him and Napoleon tells Josephine that he gives his compliments to the house chef. ???

Now Napoleon has random meetings with Josephine that I guess is supposed to be their abbreviated courtship. Josephine stares into her makeup mirror and wonders aloud to her maid (Lucille) if she looks in love. They have random conversations about how her husband was executed in front of his mistresses. How she tried to get pregnant in prison to save her life. Will any of this bother Napoleon? Napoleon answers “no, madam”. She flashes him her nether regions and Napoleon just stares. Awkward. Some old lady behind me in the theatre went “oh!”

Oh well then it’s time to get married.Josephine has the fastest growing hair in the history of the world. Last scene she was a mental patient, now her hair is shoulder length. They are giddy, well Napoleon is, at the register’s. They are sure to share Josephine’s real name but then announce that Napoleon was born in February. What? Didn’t he just change the year and not the month of his birth? But none of it matters since they never discuss their age difference anyway.

They have a dinner party where Josephine flirts with Hippolyte Charles with Napoleon glowering and then we cut to the sexy time scene where Napoleon and Josephine have sex doggy style! Oh God. Cringe. Napoleon talks of having a son. Napoleon is very broody in this movie.

Napoleon is now in Egypt. Italy is mentioned only in a letter voice over where he happily informs Josephine that he was victorious in Italy. He wonders why she isn’t writing. Insert scenes of a naked butt Charles romping in bed with Josephine. Napoleon and the mamalukes line up by the pyramids and Napoleon fires the cannons. They hit the pyramids and then he just wanders away. Is this the battle? Lol One mamaluke falls off his horse. No horse casualties.

If you ever felt that General Dumas never got his moments to shine, well he is in this movie. He’s not singled out, you just have to know it’s him. He accompanies Napoleon to see a mummy. Napoleon looks at the mummy and goes to touch it’s cheek and the mummy shifts away from his touch. Is this like some omen that like Josephine, even dead mummy’s don’t want Napoleon touching them? Lol

Junot later informs Napoleon while they eat that Josephine is unfaithful. Napoleon tells Junot that he gets no dessert and to leave, which he does. They later meet up again and Napoleon tells him he’s off to France.

Napoleon lands to fanfare in France and greets the crowd with smiles and waves. He gets in the coach, finds an English paper making fun of him and Josephine’s affairs. He waves at people out the window. He arrives home to No Josephine but dogs! There are a lot of dogs in this movie that is a win for me. He questions Lucille on her whereabouts, throws wine at her and tips a chair over. Josephine arrives to her luggage in the yard and she goes to the locked door and….next scene she is in tears and Napoleon is yelling. She is a “selfish little pig” and how could she do this…why didn’t she think of his feelings? Josephine says sorry and Napoleon makes her say she is nothing without him.

The scene cuts to the first of many scenes of Napoleon sitting awkwardly on the couches with their heads on the back cushions staring at each other. Lol. Can’t they sit normal? What are these two adults doing? Here Josephine makes Napoleon recite to her that he is a brute that is nothing without her and “your mother”. Oh boy, Napoleon is a mama’s boy too.

Napoleon has a meeting with those in charge which is a great scene of him telling all of them that they aren’t fit to run France. They accuse him of deserting his army in Egypt. He points out one by one why they can’t serve getting to one man and saying “though you can scowl very well!” He marches out saying that they have nerve questioning him when they have ruined France and he has found out his wife is a slut.

Napoleon has brunch with Sieyes and he invites him to a coup. Scenes follow of the various men being arrested or asked to step down. One man tries to escape by running up the stairs and then getting into a slap fest with two soldiers. Dumas arrests another man who says he can’t believe this he was just about to have a “scrumptious breakfast!” Dumas escorts him out leaving his hysterically crying wife saying “enjoy your breakfast”. Talleyrand tells Barras of his dismissal to which Barras says he will gladly go back to being a private citizen.

The coup is hysterical. But it was, wasn’t it? Napoleon gets manhandled and runs away falling down a flight of steps and barricading the door from the mob. He can barely stand up. Now I know some of this rubs scholars the wrong way but the coup was about as good as this. Napoleon was given a horse that he couldn’t control and was almost thrown off.

Now Napoleon is talking to Caulaincourt who talks to him about the czar. This scene actually works well. Napoleon walks around questioning and using his knife to hack away at the furniture.

Napoleon confronts an ambassador and screams at him. Here is where he shouts “you think you are so great because you have boats!”before stomping out. It is laughable but again, Napoleon was known to do this at times. He did kick one ambassador in the stomach once for no reason.

Talleyrand says hey why don’t you become Emperor. Napoleon laughs and pinches his ear.

Napoleon leads an older woman around. You guessed it! Mama is on scene. Napoleon walks her over to Josephine where Madame Mere says “This must be Josephine!” They nod at each other and then Madame Mere says “Is that Charles?” and wanders off to talk to Talleyrand. Who knew they were friends?

Napoleon still is broody. He walks in on Josephine dressing and acts like a horse, baying and stomping the ground. Josephine dismisses the maid and says “you nasty man” and more doggie style sex! She tells him her nether regions are his. Cringe.

Napoleon the next morning questions Josephine on why she isn’t pregnant. She makes excuses but says she has been busy cleaning up his messes. Napoleon whimpers again, crawls under the table and grabs her.

It’s coronation time baby! No lead up, just happens. Hippolyte Charles is there to give the evil eye to the imperial couple. Josephine looks at him as she walks by. Barras comes out of nowhere to get a prime seat up at the Dias. The pope is pretty enthusiastic proclaiming Napoleon emperor. The end.

Now Napoleon is watching David paint his portrait with a model as Talleyrand says he needs to divorce.

Now we are at Austerlitz. This is beautifully shot. There are lots of blood in the water and sadly dead horses. This doesn’t seem to be a lake they are falling into, but the ocean as they sink sink sink forever.

Now Napoleon is chatting up Emperor Francis.

Now there is a montage of happy Napoleon and Josephine moments. Napoleon plays with a dog while Josephine smiles. Napoleon and Josephine share a bath.

Now Napoleon and Josephine sit at a dinner party and Napoleon asks in front of everyone why isn’t she pregnant? Awkward. Josephine says there hasn’t been much love making in the place. Awkward. Napoleon’s mother is even like “ew”. Napoleon says that is a lie. There has been years and years! Josephine fires back that he is a fat fat fatty. Napoleon says that is true, he likes to eat, destiny brought him this lamb chop. Josephine throws food at him. Napoleon throws food at her. She throws more. WTF is going on here? No lie, an older man behind me in the theater whispered in this scene to his wife “he’s probably been putting it in the wrong hole. “

Madame Mere is the one and not Caroline to tell Napoleon she has rounded up a girl for him to see if he can get her pregnant. She says it’s time to know who is at fault. Napoleon and she drink brandy while Napoleon studies his feet. She says the girl, Elenore Denuelle, is waiting for him naked in the bed. Napoleon asks if he can have another brandy. He pauses at the door while mama shooes him in.

Next scene Madame Mere tells Napoleon the happy news of Elenore’s pregnancy.

Napoleon and Josephine have an awkward stare conversation sliding down on the couch.

Napoleon announces over dinner with Josephine the divorce. She tears up but then laughs. Napoleon leaves in a huff.

The divorce scene. Josephine has tears rolling down her cheeks. Napoleon sniffles and roughly wipes her face and his. He reads his statement. Barras is also somehow here too. Standing in the audience like a bad omen. Napoleon scolds Josephine to read her statement. She can’t get through it because she keeps laughing. I guess we are going for hysterical laughter but it plays wrong. And of course the history is that she cried so much she had to have the statement read by someone else. Here she gets slapped by Napoleon to her shock and everyone else’s but still laughs her way through it.

Josephine leaves in her carriage and lands at someplace that is Malmaison but is not Malmaison. She walks around gloomy. Napoleon visits her and puts his hat on her head. Tells her to cheer up.

Napoleon chats with the Czar and tries to marry his sister.

Napoleon is now meeting Marie Louise. Now the casting is all screwed up. Napoleon ages through the film but for some reason Josephine never does. Josephine is taller than Napoleon even though she was in reality shorter. Marie Louise is a black haired little thing when in reality she was taller than Napoleon.

Napoleon is given his son. He cries. He’s been wanting a kid for a long time, man. Napoleon takes the baby to Malmaison to visit Josephine who looks like for a second she might throw the baby over a Cliff.

Napoleon is off to Russia. Cossacks attack. Napoleon rips off little pieces of bread to his troops as they walk by. They fight at Borodino and Napoleon is leading a Calvary charge but what the hell? He’s wearing his Italian uniform. Since when did fat Napoleon get into his closest and grab up his ornate uniform? My guess is that this was meant to be Italy, they scrapped it for time and used this footage for Borodino thinking no one would notice.

Napoleon find Moscow abandoned including the Kremlin that has apparently been abandoned for decades as pigeons have taken over the place and have shit all over the czar’s nice throne. Napoleon fits so he sits. Birds continue to shit on it. I think this is supposed to be some poetic metaphor.

Napoleon wakes up flames. He comes out and asks who did this. Luckily the marshals are all there waiting and inform him. He wants to march to Petersburg. They tell him no because of winter. Napoleon puts his hands over his ears and then screams into his hat. Chill man.

Napoleon marches back in snow. Dead people. Men eating horses. Not the horses!!

Oh Napoleon is abdicating. That’s quick. Surprisingly Barras is missing from the audience.

Napoleon lands on Elba and parades around. Josephine greets the Czar and dances with him in a really stupid dress. Malmaison is always cloudy with fog and rain. Always. Every scene. Napoleon sees a paper on Elba that mocks him about Josephine entertaining the czar and him being cuckolded again. But they are divorced? He beats the paper on the table. He then writes to Josephine and tells her that he is coming back to France to reclaim his stuff including her. So I guess we don’t care about Marie Louise or baby anymore.

Btw, Josephine should be dead by now.

Josephine is shown being ill and the doctor telling her to open her mouth. He says her chest is congested and her throat inflamed and recommends going to bed. But she says Napoleon is coming over and over again. I don’t think Josephine ever called a Napoleon Napoleon either.

Napoleon gets on ship and lands on French soil. Kisses it. Josephine dies. Finally. Too late.

Napoleon greets his troops. They go to his side. He lands at Malmaison and learns from Hortense that Josephine is dead from diphtheria. Napoleon is mad at her. Why didn’t anyone tell him? He wants her letters that he wrote to her. Hortense says the valet stole them and sold them. Napoleon cries. Hortense apologizes and Napoleon says he forgives her. For what though?

Napoleon is at Waterloo. Rupert Everett is Wellington but all I can think is damn he’s old. I remember when he was a heart-throb in movies and now he’s old Wellington. Battle. Dead horses (no!!!) dead men. This is the longest battle filmed.

Napoleon is on the Bellerophon giving a class to a bunch of boys. Wellington for some reason comes for a meeting and Napoleon and he are rather friendly to each other. I wonder where Barras is? He could be here. He wasn’t. But he could be. Wellington dashes Napoleon’s hopes of remaining in England and tells him he will be off to St. Helena “a rock really”. Napoleon laughs.

At long last, Napoleon is on St. Helena with a voice over with Josephine talking to Napoleon. Next time she will be Emperor and he will have to listen to her. Napoleon is shown washing his face. Napoleon is shown drinking wine at his desk while plantblow out of the ground outside his window. There is a dead fly in his wine that he fishes out. Napoleon is at an outdoor table while Betsy Balcombe and some other girl fence with sticks. Napoleon grills them on the capitals of Europe. They do the Moscow story. How it was burned to get rid of the French. Napoleon asks who told them that and then throws dates at them as they run back to play. Another voice over from Josephine. She tells Napoleon she has prepared a place for him why doesn’t he come? We see Napoleon’s back and his famous hat from the back as he sits at the table. Come she tells him and we will try again. Napoleon drops over dead. Well, that’s not how it went but okay.

Jesus. That was a lot. I will do my final thoughts tomorrow.

[about-faces]

I was just wondering, are there any particularly good Elseworlds or AU stories that involve Two-Face/Harvey in them? Are there any in particular that you'd recommend actually picking up and reading? (I've been thinking about actually reading Masque and Two Faces lately, but was wondering if there were any others worth checking out!)

Ah, Elseworlds,: DC’s venerable AU imprint. As is the case everywhere else, these were a mixed bag of good, bad, weird, and forgettable, and Harvey’s appearances in them was no exception. The two you cited are perfect examples (in addition to being his two most prominent Elseworlds stories):

Two Faces is, pound for pound, the very best Harvey Elseworlds story. Not surprising, since it comes from one of the greatest comic-writing teams ever, Abnett & Lanning! Bruce is a Jekyll figure who “Hydes” himself in the name of finding a chemical cure for Harvey, who has become an airship-flying, bowler-hatted Two-Face.

It’s great, and the conclusion has long been one of my favorite looks at their friendship and the lengths they’ll go for one another. How I wish we’d gotten a sequel with that particular Batman. In terms of Victorian Batman stories, I vastly prefer this to “Gotham By Gaslight,”which I’ve always felt has been rather overrated.

Masque, by contrast, is not very good but still worth reading. I think of Mike Grell as an artist who sometimes writes, and this is very much an artist’s story, using both Bruce and Harvey as Phantom figures with the opera swiped out for ballet, presumably for the purposes of comics being a visual reading medium.

But as both a story and a Phantom tribute, it’s rather thin, with little to say. Still, it has Harvey as a flamboyant, romantic, murderous ballet danseur, so that’s worth checking out on its own.

Beyond those two, there are a few other Elseworlds worth tracking down. The first is in the vein of Masque, in that it’s a thin take on Harvey that entirely coasts on his concept and physical appearance.

In this take on The Scarlet Pimpernel, Harvey is the French Revolutionary Hervé Deinte, who clashes with the mysterious Bat-Man seeking to fight against Robespierre.

Mike W Barr has never been a good writer of Two-Face, but Jose-Luis Garcia-Lopez’ incredible art more than makes this worth reading, especially for the unusually dashing and dangerous take on Diente.

The next recommendations are a pair of noirish tales that came out around the same time. The more famous of these is Nine Lives, which was published sideways to presumably replicate letterbox cinema format.

Harvey in this story is Bruce’s friend and lawyer, but get this: he’s two-faced! In that he sells out Bruce to try getting rich with the Joker stand-in. Plus he uses his coin to con people, not a fan of that.

Still, his face-turn (pun not intended) at the end to save Bruce helps redeem these flaws, and the story is pretty solid noir all around, albeit a bit dry for my tastes.

I strongly prefer the other noir Elseworlds, Gotham Noir, by the impeccable team of Brubaker and Phillips. It’s more hard-boiled (more like pulp compared to Nine Lives' literary noir), and not afraid to be a bit more outlandish, and I love Harvey’s role here as the DA, which is more in line with his role in Year One. Brubaker also gets to play with a concept he introduced elsewhere, that Batman is credited as a myth that Dent cooked up to scare criminals.

Next up are two Lovecraftian takes on Batman with prominent Harvey roles. The first and far more famous is Mike Mignola’s The Doom That Came To Gotham, which somehow manages to make Harvey suffer even more than usual.

It’s a rare take on a Harvey Dent who is purely good and purely a victim, where even his transformation into a Two-Face of sorts is just… sad. It’s great!

“The Crawling Hand,” however, is far more obscure and for good reason: it was included in the infamous Elseworlds 80-Page Giant which was initially scrapped and pulped before release because of Kyle Baker’s story about Superman’s babysitter. As a result, this story is still a little-known curiosity with Bruce and Harvey trying to survive eldritch takes on DC’s stretchy characters, with Harvey ending up as a surviving casualty lost to madness. Fun!

Finally, the last Elseworlds I’d recommend is one that has no reason to be an Elseworlds at all: the Daredevil/Batman crossover. Seriously, why the hell was this an Elseworlds? No one dies, there���s nothing to indicate an alternate setting… literally the only reason I can even imagine why DC slapped on the AU label—seemingly at the last second!—is because they didn’t want it canon that Harvey and Matt Murdock were rival-friends back in college!

Granted, it IS a bit weird to have a story with Matt being the one who believe in Harvey Dent while Batman is a hardline jerkass who hates Harvey, but that was hardly out of place in this era of Bruce being a grim prick. I’m baffled as to why it’s an Elseworlds at all, but hey, it technically counts! Definitely worth checking out either way!

All in all, a mixed bag of good and interesting. Seeing these again makes me long to see the Elseworlds imprint revived, especially now that we're getting new Elseworlds projects in film and TV thanks to James Gunn. Maybe we'll finally see some cool, interesting new takes on Two-Face in the near future!

[qui-rault]

Aulard on Herault de Sechelles

Okay here we go, another author who is absolutely in love with Herault. I’m not even joking, Aulard is completely head over heels for this man. So here is his chapter on Herault de Sechelles in his book Les orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention: l'éloquence parlementaire pendant la Révolution française (Tome 2). Link here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5441755r  

A few notes: 

When I make a translation, I am not agreeing or disagreeing with anything an author says. It's important to keep in mind that every author has their own agenda and writes about historical events and historical figures within the context of their own viewpoint. Aulard , as you will see, is a keen supporter of Danton, and he labels Herault as a Dantoniste throughout the entire chapter. Whether Herault should be considered as a strict Dantoniste is, in my non-professional opinion, up for debate. A lot of people are still not aware, for example, that he and Fabre d'Eglantine were arrested separately to, and before Danton and Camille were arrested, and it was only afterwards that it was decided that they should be tried together.

Aulard neglects to give sources for several of the statements that he makes and is very condescending towards Robespierre and Saint-Just. He also seems to try to justify Herault’s actions during the revolution by saying that he was mostly acting to keep Robespierre off his back. I personally think this is incredibly injurious to Herault, who was an active participant in the Revolution – we have no reason to believe, as many would like to, that he was only pretending to support the Revolution to survive, rather than because he genuinely believed in its principles.   

Also, apparently Herault bought a lottery office for one of his mistresses and I just … cannot deal with this man.  

Anything with an asterisk is my personal note/observation. I will take the time to remind every one again that my French is dismal and that is why I always link the original. Huge thank you again to @ans-treasurebox for helping me with translating parts of this and also to @orpheusmori who had to sit there and put up with me losing my mind over Herault on the Discord for several nights in a row.

 

Chapter VIII – Herault de Sechelles  

I 

Herault de Sechelles was the ornament of the Dantonist party. A man of the court and of noble family (1), a classical and lucid spirit, an orator enamored with academic elegance, he forms a perfect contrast with the rusticity of Legendre. When he was very young, he was introduced to Marie Antoinette by her cousin Madame de Polignac, pleased her, and obtained from her a position as a lawyer at the Chatelet. He won great success there through his talent for speaking and by the choice of his causes, calculated to interest the sensitivity of his protectors. "There is applause on all sides, says one of his biographers, at his eloquent indignation against the ingratitude of a pupil towards his tutor and against the odious behavior of an opulent girl who had abandoned her mother in need." 

(1) His grandfather had been lieutenant general; his father, colonel of the Rouergue regiment, had perished gloriously at the Battle of Minden (Jules Claretie, Les Dantonistes, p. 317). He was also a nephew of the Marshal de Contades (Souvenirs de Berryer, I, 1) 

In 1779, at the age of 19, he published Eloge de Suger. Serious and charming, he was soon called, by the favor of the Queen (1), to the post of Advocate General in the Parliament of Paris. The parliamentarians, he would say, hated him, either because of the rapidity of his fortune (2), or for his philosophism. 

(1) She sent him, it is said, a scarf embroidered with her own hand. - His last speech as a lawyer was a triumph: the magistrates and the audience accompanied him, applauding, to his carriage. Journal de Paris of August 7, 1785, quoted by J. Claretie, ibid. 

(2) La pere de Berryer's (ibid.) says that he had been appointed after a hard fight and he adds "He had justified this sudden elevation by the marvelous ease of speaking, which he had shown in various causes of brilliance." 

He did not believe himself out of place among the combatants of July 14, and he broke with the court party at the beginning of the revolution. At the end of 1790, he was elected judge in Paris, then he became commissioner of the king at the tribunal de cassation. A member of Parliament for Paris in the Legislative Assembly, he hesitated at first between the royalists and the Jacobins. On the 6th of October, he protested against the revolutionary decree issued the day before on the ceremonial of the royal session. Interrupted as an aristocrat, he was silent and observed in silence until the end of 1791. 

On the 29th of December, he delivered a speech on war, in which, in the manner of Brissot, but more briefly, he drew a picture of the state of Europe: according to him, each power was too poor to desire war. All the more reason to demand a lot, to summon the King of Prussia, to intimidate the counterrevolutionaries from within. Is he for war or for peace? Does he support Brissot or Robespierre? We don't know; but we can see in his somewhat equivocal words the Dantoniste policy: let's make war, but let’s be sure about making it, after having defeated the court. 

This speech pleased and, although ambiguous, rang true. From then on, Herault followed a democratic line. On the 14th of January, in response to the declaration of Pilnitz, he proposed to the Assembly an address to the people, in which the perfidy of the court was clearly indicated. As for the threats of Europe, France only had to rise to confound them. "Certainly, the French, after having taken such a high rank, will not resolve to descend to the last place; yes, the last, for there is on earth something more vile than a slave people, it is a people who become so again after having known how to cease to be so." 

On the 24th of January, he attacked the draft decree presented by the diplomatic committee in response to the Emperor's office: "I regret, he said, that the committee did not announce or rather reiterate the known resolution of France, which, as a consequence of her renunciation of any conquest, having also renounced to meddle in any way with the form of government of other powers, must doubtlessly, in the face of all mankind, expect the most perfect reciprocity; and when one will see a wise people regulating within its homes the form in which it suits it to live, leaving peace to its neighbors and seeking order for itself; if ambitions, vengeance, dare to arm themselves against the happiness of such a people, the world, posterity, history, by pitying them, will avenge them, and will mark with eternal opprobrium their vanquished enemies and even their conquerors, if there could be any.” 

This elevated and diplomatic language made an impression and the Assembly voted the draft decree of Herault, by which the king was invited to declare to the emperor that he could henceforth treat with him only in the name of the French nation, to ask him if he wanted to remain the friend of the French nation and to give until the 15th of February to respond. 

He was twice rapporteur for the legislation committee: on the 22nd of February, on ministerial responsibility, the conditions of which he discussed pleasantly; on the 7th of April on the acceleration of judgments in cassation. 

At the beginning of July 1792, the gravity of the circumstances had led the Assembly to add an extraordinary commission to the diplomatic and military committees. The diplomatic qualities of his words led Herault, on the choice of his colleagues, to be designated for the drafting of the report relating to the declaration of the homeland in danger, a report which would be read with passionate attention by all of Europe (July 11). "Our most important business, he said, is to go to war soon, and not to wait for a chance or a set back which, however slight, might make some of the powers who are now mute observers, but whose diplomatic correspondence shows us, perhaps in the distance, secret hopes and a prudence subordinated to fortune, determine to be against us. Let us therefore produce a great movement, let us deploy a formidable apparatus, let us interest each citizen in his fate: let’s call, it is time, all over the fatherland, all the French, all those who, having sworn to defend the Constitution until death, have the happiness of finally being able to carry out their oath. The fatherland is in danger, and this single word, like the electric spark, hardly left within the national representation, will resound the same day in the 83 departments, will rumble on the heads of the despots and their slaves; and this single word will repel their attacks, or will victoriously support the negotiations, if, however, these are negotiations that we can hear and which in no way alter the immutable sanctity of our rights.”  

In a more critical than enthusiastic spirit, Herault examines the objections that could be made to this declaration; he exposes them with a gift of objectivity very rare in this time of passion. He ends with a sufficiently warm oratory: "When, under Louis XIV, despotism, seconded by the genius of Turenne, held in check four armies at the same time, let us believe with confidence in the cause of the human race and in the miracles of freedom. Ah, gentlemen, a prophetic voice rises in my heart: we have sworn to be free; it is to have sworn to conquer! Called, in the face of the universe, to stipulate the rights of humanity, let us avenge these sacred and imperishable rights: I swear by these phalanxes which will gather from all parts of France, and by you, intrepid Gouvion, by you, brave Cazotte; and by all of you whom a death so beautiful and so desirable has reaped before the victory, under the walls of Philippeville; virtuous citizens, whose memory will henceforth preside over our destinies, and whose souls, quivering with joy in the depths of the tombs, will share in all our triumphs!”  

In matters of revolutionary enthusiasm, that is all that the noble and pure rhetoric of Herault de Sechelles can give. He understands, he interprets with truth the spirit of 1792; he is not under its influence. His reason approves of patriotic folly; his heart does not share it. There is in this beautiful spirit an inability to be moved, to vibrate with the same passions as the people. He admires Danton and would like, I believe, to possess his sympathetic verve; but, whatever he does, he mingles with the passions of the time only as a dilettante, with the reserve of a delicate observer, with a good will that is immediately cooled by a innate decency. His friend Paganel said that he distinguished himself from the men of his party by "his liberal education, his gentle affections, the tastes and the urbanity which reveal the beautiful forms of his body and the noble and brilliant features of his face". (1)  

(1) Paganel, II, 247. Cf. Souvenirs du pere du Berryer, I, 176 “Herault de Sechelles was not forty years old in Year II. He was one of the most handsome men in France, tall, dark-faced, very noble; he had the manners of the court." 

Indolent, selfish, he pleased everyone, even the fiercest sans-culottes, who forgave him his status as a ci-devant because of his modesty, his affability, and the pleasant turn he gave to the most revolutionary measures. Paganel, believing to praise him, judges him severely "He spared, he says, all opinions, and appropriately took, but only for his defense, the colors of each party." No, Herault was not a hypocrite (1), but an epicurean who tasted the flower of each opinion in turn, an eclectic to whom it seemed that all sides were right, but that there was more common sense and good faith in that of Danton. He loved life; but he did nothing ugly to avoid the guillotine. His laziness explains what is undulating in his politics, and Paganel was truer and shrewder when he wrote "laziness dominated over all his tastes, and the love of women over all his other passions. His speeches to the tribune, his work on the committees, were many victories he won over himself, were so many thefts from his pleasures. Herault lavished a life which promised him only brief pleasures. He was always ready to lose it. He felt that the genius of the Revolution would prevail over his precautions and his prudence; and each event warned him of his destiny. He spared himself the terrors of it, by filling with much existence the few days which were counted to him..." 

(1) This reputation came to him from the contrast which was noticed between his political gravity and his private playfulness. Saint-Just would say hatefully in his report: "Herault was serious in the Convention, a buffoon elsewhere, and laughed incessantly to excuse himself for not saying anything". And Sieyes wrote in his intimate notes: "Brilliant with his success, H. de S., in his distraction, looked like a very happy funny fellow, who smiled at the irascibility of his thoughts" (Sainte-Beave, Causories du Lundi, t. V).” 

Mais c’est la Herault tel que le fit la crise meme de la Terreur.* In 1792, he is still smiling and optimistic. It does not seem that the fall of the throne moved him. On the 17th of August, he traced with a rather bold hand the first draft of the revolutionary tribunal. His educated voice mingled with the great voice of Danton in the work of national excitement which marked, in August 1792, the dictatorship of the Cordeliers and Girondin patriots. His proclamation on the capture of Longwy (August 26) is not lacking in emphasis, any more than the noble letter he wrote on September 10, in his capacity as president, to the widow of the heroic Beaurepaire. 

*This sentence has eluded my ability to translate.  

In the first six months of the Convention where he represented the department of Seine-et-Oise, his speeches were rare. Elected president on the 2nd of November, he was sent with Simon, Gregoire and Jagot, to Mont Blanc. He was still there during the trial of the king, whom he condemned, it is said, by letter, but without saying to what penalty. The Convention liked to be presided over by this man of noble face and conciliatory manners. They put him at their head on two important occasions. It was he who presided temporarily, in place of Isnard, on the night of May 27 to 28, when the commission of the Twelve was broken up for the first time. On the 2nd of June, he replaced the tired Mallarme in the chair, and had the sad honor of guiding the Convention in the walk it took in the Tuileries Gardens and the Carousel, to make people believe that it was free and to save its dignity. It was therefore to the beautiful Herault that Hanriot made his crude reply "The people did not rise to listen to phrases, but to give orders." 

He was made a deputy to the Committee of Public Safety on the 30th of May "to present constitutional basics". On the 10th of June he tabled the famous draft Constitution, improvised with so much haste. Circumstances alone made the short and dull report he read on this subject famous. There is only one original idea: the establishment of a national grand jury, to which each department would appoint a member, and whose function would be “to protect the citizens from the oppression of the Legislative Body and the Executive Council.” This article was rejected on the 16th of June at the request of Herault himself, who declared that he had always considered the institution of the a national jury to be very dangerous. This is the first time that a reporter has admitted to having an opinion other than expressed in their report. And yet, on the 24th of June, he proposed in his name an additional article: of the censorship of the people against its deputies and of its guarantee against the oppression of the legislative body. This system contained the single Chamber, counterbalanced it as a second Chamber, and tended to the same end as the "national jury". This bicameriste insistence of Herault served as a theme for the Robespierrist Jacobins to slander him. "We remember, Saint-Just would say in his report, that Herault was with disgust the mute witness of the work of those who drew up the plan of the Constitution, of which he skillfully made himself the shameless reporter." (1) 

(1) Yet Couthon praised Herault’s attitude on the committee to the tribunal (26 brumaire an II). 

Yet nothing would alter the favor he enjoyed at the Convention. Re-elected to the Committee of Public Safety, on the 17th of July he made this chimerical and Jacobin proposal, inspired by the beautiful dreams of Jean-Jacques, at which his skepticism must have made him smile to himself, "Citizens, you decreed this morning that the house of the traitor Buzot, in Evreux, would be razed. The Committee of Public Safety thought that it was necessary to celebrate the return of freedom in this city by a civic festival, in which six young virtuous republicans will be married to six young republicans chosen by an assembly of old men. The dowry of these young girls will be provided by the nation". The Convention adopted the proposal. 

As we can see, his talented pen didn't hesitate to align with the ideas of others. There was even one instance where he acted as a rapporteur to interpret the underlying opposition of the Robespierrists to Danton's inclinations. On August 1st, 1793, Danton had proposed the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety as a provisional government, seeing in this unity of dictatorship the most effective means to defend the nation and the revolution. Hérault had too much political acumen and was too much a friend of Danton to hesitate in opposing the anarchic and disorganizing spirit alongside him. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to be influenced and presented a report against his master's proposal, contributing to its rejection on August 2. 

On the 9th of August, by a singular favor, the Convention called him once more to the chair. They wanted her noblest and finest speaker to appear and speak in their name at the national holiday, which was held the next day in honor of the acceptance of the Constitution by the people. It was a new federation. Mixed with an immense retinue in which there were delegates from all the primary assemblies of the Republic, the Convention went slowly to the Champ de Mars, according to the program created by David, and stopped at six solemn stations, in front of the fountain of regeneration, in front of the triumphal arch erected in honor of the women of October 6, at the Place de la Revolution, at the Invalides, at the altar of the fatherland, and finally in front of the monument for the warriors who died for the fatherland, at the Champ de Mars. 

Herault thus delivered six speeches which shone more by the high decency of the expressions than by the internal feeling. He moved the people, however, when he addressed the dead soldiers: "Ah! how happy you were! You died for your country, for a land dear to nature, loved by heaven; for a generous nation, which vowed a dedication to all feelings, to all virtues; for a Republic where places and rewards are no longer reserved for favor, as in other states, but assigned by esteem and by trust, you have therefore fulfilled your function as men and French men; you entered the tomb after having fulfilled the most glorious and desirable destiny that there is on earth; we will not outrage you with tears.” 

The spirit of this festival, as reflected in the speeches of Herault de Sechelles, was entirely philosophical and naturalistic: "Oh Nature! exclaimed the friend of Danton, receive the expression of the eternal attachment of the French for your laws, and that these fertiles waters that spring from your breasts , that this pure drink that watered the first humans consecrate in this cup of fraternity and equality, the oaths that France makes to you on this day, the most beautiful that the sun has lit since it was suspended in the vastness of space.” 

The inspiration of the six speeches of the president of the Convention had no deist, spiritualist character: it is the indirect negation of the ideas of Rousseau, the glorification of the positivist tendencies of Diderot. One can imagine what sadness, sincere and respectable, Robespierre must have experienced at this demonstration which already foresaw the Feast of Reason. I admit that he, who was born to preach, was envious of the role of great philosophical pontiff that the Dantonist Herault played that day. But it was a deeper feeling, a believer's pain that kindled in him that hatred, of which the harmless and amiable haranguer was to be the victim. 

II 

From then on, [Herault] felt himself watched by the symbolic and frightening eye which figured on the banners of the Jacobins, and he saw that Robespierre was watching him. He immediately darkened the color of his presidential speeches, but without carmagnole. Soon he had himself sent on a mission to Alsace, and he wrote, from Plotzheim, on 7 Frimaire Year II, in Jacobin style: "I have taken all possible measures to raise the department of Haut-Rhin to the level of the Republic. The public spirit was entirely corrupted there. Intelligence with the enemy, aristocracy, fanaticism, contempt for assignats, speculation and non-execution of the laws everywhere: I fought all these scourges, I suspended the department, created a departmental commission; I forced the popular Society to regenerate itself; I broke up the surveillance committees, the least of which were feuillants, and I replaced them with sans-culottes; I organized here the movement of terror which alone could consolidate the Republic: I have created a central committee of revolutionary activity, which requires the rapid action of all the authorities; a revolutionary force detached from the army and which covers the whole department; a revolutionary tribunal, finally, which will bring the country to its senses. " 

Thus declaimed this delicate,* for reason as much as for personal prudence: we know, moreover, that he was not rigorous to the aristocrats of Alsace and that he did not shed a drop of blood (1). 

*Aulard uses delicate here as a noun and I’m genuinely not sure what to translate it as. Possibly he means fop, or dandy, possibly someone who is tricky or someone who is tactful, as in a “delicate situation”. However, these are only my suggestions and possibly inaccurate.  

(1) Cf. Hist. De la Revol. Fr. Dans le departement du Haut-Rhin, par Veron-Reville, 1865, in-8.  

But, since the feast of August 10, Robespierre had been weaving a skillful plot against him and was trying to undermine the Dantonist party through him. His plan, indicated in his intimate notes (2), was to make Herault pass for a spy for foreign powers in the Committee of Public Safety.  

(2) Le proces des dantonistes, par le docteur Robinet, pass. 

The care which this serious spirit took to learn about all foreign affairs, his continual handling of diplomatic papers, might give some pretext to the accusation of communicating to the enemy the plans of the revolutionary government.  

As it happened, like everyone else, he had had relations with Proly, bastard of the Prince of Kaunitz. On 26 Brumaire, Bourdon (de l'Oise) echoed these rumors, and dared to say to the Convention: "I denounce to you the ci-devant attorney general, the ci-devant noble Herault Sechelles, member of the Committee of Public Safety, and now commissioner in the Army of the Rhine, for his liaisons with Pereyra, Dubuisson and Proly." But the mine burst too soon: there was a general protest, and Couthon himself had the honesty to pay homage to the patriotism of Herault. 

However, an incident had occurred in Alsace, which gave pretext to enormous calumnies. In Brumaire, a letter was intercepted at the outposts of General Michaud's army, who sent it to Saint-Just and Lebas, in Strasbourg. Signed: the Marquis de Saint-Hilaire, this letter tended to lead people to believe in intelligence between the people of Strasbourg and the enemy. The trick was crude. But how to make Saint-Just listen to reason? He immediately imprisoned part of the authorities of Strasbourg, and left in his post only the mayor Monet, and a deputy. A second letter arrived immediately, same signature, dated Colmar, 7 Frimaire Year II. The mayor was reproached for not having yet delivered the city, despite the money received: and the "marquis de Saint-Hilaire" added: "I have only been here (in Colmar) to talk to our friend Herault, who promised me everything." 

On the spot, the representative Lemane, who had replaced Saint-Just and Lebas in Strasbourg, had the mayor arrested and, insultingly, sent the letter to Herault. [Herault] brought together the authorites and the popular Society of Colmar and, in a long speech, warns them against the machinations of the royalists, adding that he asks for his recall. It was, among the patriots of Alsace, a cry of pain, for Herault had made himself loved during his mission. But he was exasperated by Lemane's suspicion (1). 

(1) Veron.Reville, pass.  

Back at the Convention, he was all the more anxious to justify himself because his colleagues on the Committee displayed an insulting distrust of him. Young Robespierre claimed to have brought back from Toulon a document which proved the betrayal of his college: "Ah! how could I be vile enough, cried Herault, to abandon myself to criminal liaisons, I've only had one intimate friend since the age of six. Here he is! (pointing to Lepelletier's painting) Michel Lepelletier (2) O you, from whom I will never part, whose virtue is my model; you who were, like me, the butt of parliamentary hatred, happy martyr, I envy your glory. I would rush like you, for my country, to meet the daggers of freedom; but were it necessary that I were assassinated by the dagger of a Republican? - Here is my profession of faith. If having been thrown by the chance of birth into this caste that Lepelletier and I have not ceased to fight and despise is a crime which I must atone for: if I must, I still have the freedom to make new sacrifices; if a single member of this assembly sees me with suspicion at the Committee of Public Safety: if my prorogation, a source of continually recurring hassles, can harm the public thing before which I must disappear, then I pray the National Convention to accept my resignation from this Committee." 

Not one of the accusers answered a word; the Convention not only passed on the agenda on the resignation of Herault, it ordered the printing of his speech (9 Nivose). 

(2) assassinated Lepelletier, like Marat, had only admirers. In reality, Herault could not bear his vanity, and mocked him. This president, after 89, refused one day to sit at the same table as a simple prosecutor. We find the comic account of this incident as it took place at Herault’s house, in Oeuvres completes de Bellart, VI, 128. 

This triumph did not stop the calumny. On 11 Nivose, Robespierre wrote in his own hand and had Collot, Billaud, Carnot and Barère sign this letter to Herault, "Citizen colleague, you had been denounced to the National Convention, which sent this denunciation back to us. We need to know if you persist in the resignation which you have, it is said, offered yesterday to the National Convention. We ask you to choose between perseverance in your resignation and a report of the Committee on the denunciation of which you have been the object: because we have here an indispensable duty to fulfill. We await your written repudiation today or tomorrow at the latest." These hypocritical threats did not intimidate Herault: he did not resign, and the Committee made no report. 

The documents of young Robespierre, we have them: they are in the Archives. These are Spanish papers seized by one of the cruises on an enemy ship: the name of Herault is not even stated there. It is to be believed that the famous threatening letter had no other purpose than to force Herault to reveal himself, in the event that, as was hoped, he would be guilty of high treason. We can guess Robespierre's rage, his confusion, in the presence of this disappointment. His audacity knew no bounds: on 26 Ventose, Herault was arrested with Simond for complicity with the enemies of the Republic and relations with a citizen charged with emigration. The next day, on a summary report from Saint-Just, the Convention ratified this arrest, but did not decree it until 11 Germinal with the Dantonists. 

In the meantime, the innocence of the defendant had come to light: the emigre whom he had been accused of hiding in his home was none other than his own secretary, Catus, appointed by the Committee of Public Safety and who, if he had crossed the border, had only been able to do so for a diplomatic mission. They were careful not to confront Herault with this. Moreover, Saint-Just's report of 11 Germinal did not make the slightest allusion to this grievance, which had been the official cause of the Dantonist's [Herault’s] arrest. It was not even brought up at the revolutionary tribunal. (1) 

(1) Cf Robinet, 349-352.  

In order to ruin Herault, it was necessary to resuscitate the old grievance formerly disavowed by Couthon, and to accuse him of complicity with the foreigner. Saint-Just dared to say: "Herault, who had placed himself at the head of diplomatic affairs, did everything possible to avert the projects of the government. Through him, the most secret deliberations of the Foreign Affairs Committee were communicated to the foreign governments. He had Dubuisson make several trips to Switzerland, to conspire there under the very seal of the Republic.” 

It was not easy for the men of the revolutionary tribunal to color the condemnation of Herault who had exclaimed proudly, in the style of Danton: "I challenge you to present the slightest clue, the slightest adminicle possible, to make me only suspect of these communications." (2)  

(2) Asked about his name and where he lives: "My name is Marie-Jean, a name not very prominent even among the saints. I sat in this room where I was hated by parliamentarians." Accused of complicity with Chabot and others, he confined himself to denying that he had knowledge of the affair. The court did not insist. But it must be recognized that Herault's notorious intimate relationship with the Abbe d'Espagnac made an unfavorable impression. 

They then read to him the famous papers seized on a Spanish ship, two letters from Las Casas and Clemente de Campos, Ambassador of Spain, in which Herault was mentioned by name as an agent of the foreign country. The unfortunate replied: "The tenor of these letters, the perfidious style in which they are written, sufficiently indicates that they were fabricated abroad only to make patriots into suspect and to ruin them. And certainly, the trap is too grossly overstretched to let myself get caught up in it!" Now, and this is not the least infamy of the Robespierreists, the prosecution had not hesitated, in order to ruin Herault, to insert his name in the two Spanish letters, to fabricate all the passage where his accomplices were supposed to reveal his name. We have said it: these papers are in the Archives, M. Robinet published them, and there is no question of Herault’s involvement. 

Asked about his mission in Alsace and about his negotiations in Switzerland, he replied, according to Topino-Lebrun, that he had worked, with Barthelemy, for the neutrality of Switzerland, and protected France from an army of 60,000 men. . -And Dubuisson's mission? It was Minister Defeorgues who gave it to him. -And Proly? - "I never communicated to Proly anything in politics, there was none (sic). Moreover, I had to confront myself with Proly. I was deceived, like Jay Sainte-Foix, like the Convention, like Jean-Bon, who wanted to take him on as a secretary, like Collot d'Herbois." And he added: "Like Marat, Proly was carried in triumph. The Convention, by a solemn decree, received my explanations."  

Then came the insignificant accusation of having corresponded with a refractory priest. To which Herault replied that this priest, being a simple canon, could not be submitted to the oath and therefore could not be refractory. Finally, in a sort of peroration, he recalled what he had done and suffered for the Revolution. "It is here," he said, "the moment to invoke my services, to remind my judges of this Constitution which has cost me so much sweat, this Constitution accepted by all good French citizens as making them happy:  It is by this Constitution that I saved the fatherland, and I can tell the French what a Roman general said: At this time, in which I have saved you, let us go to the Capitol to give thanks to the gods. These were not the only services I rendered to the fatherland: I was seen on the memorable day of July 14, 1789." Here, either foolishly or by malice, the Bulletin defers these six lines that conclude Herault’s defence to the next issue: "On July 14, 1789, I had two men killed beside me: I have not ceased to be pursued by the royalists, and especially in my mission in Sardinia. I was appointed judge, to the great regret of all the counter-revolutionaries who shuddered with rage; and when I accepted this post, it was necessary to have had courage to fill it." 

All accounts agree that Herault was imperturbable in the midst of these dreadful debates. Condemned, he said coldly: "I expected that!" And later, approaching Camille, who was choked up and foamed with rage: "My friend, let's show that we know how to die." On the cart, according to Desessarts, "he was placed alone on the last seat; he carried his head high, but without any affectation; the most beautiful color shone on his face. Nothing announced the slightest agitation in his soul: his eyes were gentle and modest, he cast them around him without seeking to fix attention or to inspire interest. One would have said, seeing him, that cheerful ideas were occupying his imagination." 

III 

Such was the political career of Herault, much inferior to the personal merit of this distinguished man, one of the finest natures that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. His philosophical opinions were those of Diderot, for who, a little denigrating, he wrote an unreserved eulogy (1). 

(1) Voyage a Montbar, etc., au IX, in-8, p. 107-108.  

They were also those that Buffon expressed to him in 1785: "I have always named the creator, said the great writer to him in an intimate outpouring; but you only have to remove this word, and naturally replace it with the power of nature, to give rise to two great laws: attraction and impulse (2).” 

(2) Ibid., pg. 36.  

The same philosophical freedom appeared in Herault's conversation. Shortly after 89, the lawyer Bellart, invited to the house in Epone, was scandalized by the remarks which he heard there. "The master of the house rested from the impieties with the obscenities. Finally, in two or three days, I discovered that he was materialistic to the highest degree." Bellart took it into his head to convert him and delivered to him a tirade as orthodox as Sganarella's remonstrance to Don Juan: "Don't be afraid," replied the other; although materialistic I will still take care of you, if necessary (3)." 

(3) Oeuvres de Bellart, tom. VI, p. 125-129. 

In frimaire Year II, Vilate attended a conversation between Herault and Barere on the supreme goal of the Revolution. Herault placed himself above all from a philosophical point of view. He already saw "the reveries of paganism and the follies of the Church replaced by reason and truth." "Nature, he said, will be the god of the French, as the universe is its temple." He therefore expressed his intimate feelings when, on the feast of August 10, surrounded by all his colleagues, he addressed an official prayer to Nature. On his mission at Colmar, he had made a proclamation "to replace, he said, false religions by the study of nature", and issued a decree which made the decadi obligatory, and instituted a festival of Reason in each canton capital (4). 

(4) Sciout, Hist. De la Constitution civile, III, 741.  

To the Robespierrist animosity aroused by such opinions, it would have been necessary to oppose pure and rigid mores. But this delicate* (perhaps entirely disgusted) lived in an elegant orgy. He was the titular lover of the beautiful and famous Sainte-Amaranthe. He knew the art of living together in peace, around him, several young women whom his beauty had fascinated. He made them wear his colors, yellow and purple, and the ultra-Jacobin Vinent denounced in his journal the impudence of this debauched young patriot. He himself confesses all this in gallant letters published by La Morency, the authenticity of which is indisputable. 

*Same issue with the use of the word delicate.  

Even if her style did not reveal the truth of Herault in every line, what interest would Morency have had, in 1799, in forging the documents with which she decorated her autobiographical novel of Illyrine? (1)  

(1) Illyrine ou l’ecueil de l’inexperience, an VII, 3 vol., in-8. 

Certainly, neither the mores nor the style of this cheerful woman are recommendable. It was she who wrote, with her French and her heart: "We are only happy by doing: it's my morality." But there is an air of truth in the confidences which is further accentuated by the author's thoughtlessness. Yes, the mistress of the conventionnel Quinette was too silly to imagine the details, so probable, so vivid, of her affair with Herault, she who could only support Illyrine's reputation by gross plagiarism (2). 

(2) When she saw the handsome Dantonist, she thought she saw, she said naively, the god of love, the graces of Apollo. Invited to dinner with Quinette, in the luxurious apartment of Hérault, she admired the large library, the elegant living room, the outfit of the young conventionnel "his redingote de levite of bazin anglais, lined with blue taffeta."* 

*Redingote de levite is a type of jacket/coat, while bazin anglais is a type of fabric.  

The story of the visit she made to him at the Convention on the day when he was named president (November 2, 1792) is a piquant tableau of the mores of the time. She handed him, shortly afterwards, a petition in favor of divorce, which Herault read to the Convention and, he said, caused applause. But, a few days later (November 29, 1792), the gallant president was sent to the mission. "It is from the Committee of Public Safety, with the horses at the carriages, that I am writing to you, dear and beautiful; I am leaving at this moment for Mont-Blanc with a secret and important mission...". And, after having spoken to her of his mistresses and of the perfidy of Sainte-Amaranthe, he ended thus: "Adieu, Suzanne. Go sometimes to the Assembly in memory of me. Adieu. The horses rage, and one believes me nationally occupied, while I am only in love with my very dear Suzanne." 

When Herault returned, everything was his, and he bought a lottery office for his mistress, for which the security of 30,000 francs was lent, she affirms, by the Abbe d'Espagnac. It hurts to see Danton's friend take pleasure in such base intimacy which bordered on cynicism. La Morency has innocuously traced the picture, quite Pompeian, of the erotic distractions of his orgy comrades. No less naively, she explains this shamelessness: "It is rather to kill himself, she says, that he takes pleasure to excess, than to be happy." Herault said to her, probably in the first weeks of 1794 "Sinister omens threaten me, I want to hasten to live; and when they tear me from life, they will think they are killing a man of thirty-two: well! I will have eighty years, because I want to live for ten years in one day!". 

It must be admitted: this epicureanism, so indecent in such circumstances, gave color and force to the Robespierrist accusations and compromised Danton's party. But should we see in Herault, as in such a friend of Hebert, a wallowing brute? "Elegant writer, says Paganel, he devoted to letters all the time he stole from the tastes that dominated in him." I have not been able to read Eloge de Suger, which he published at the age of twenty-nine; but his Voyage a Montbar (1785) is an exquisite piece in every respect, in which Buffon lives whole again, man and author. In there, Herault does not show himself, as Sainte-Beuve said, "a light, unfaithful and mocking spy" (1), but an observer and a painter. By the fine truth of his insights, he is ahead of Stendhal, whose dryness and precision he has. A laborious writer, he constantly pursues brevity and simplicity, and he achieves the strength of Chamfort, with more breadth of intelligence and a concern for general insights that he perhaps owes to his association with Buffon (2). 

(1) Causeries de Lundi, IV, 354.  

(2) In 1788, he published (or rather had printed) le Codicile politique et pratique d’un jeune habitant d’Epone. Revised in prison, this work was not widely distributed to the public until 1801 under the title Theorie de l'ambition. These moral reflections, influenced by a philosophy that is a little too positive and dry, offer a pessimism that is tempered by a good-toned irony. M. Claretie has already pointed out the most remarkable of these maxims as well as a chapter on conversation, where Herault characterizes the most ingenious conversationalists of the end of the eighteenth century and the ideal orator as the one who would summarize the different kinds of spirit of Thomas, de Delille, de Garat, de Cerutti, d'Alembert, de Buffon, de Gerbier and a few others, lawyers or actors. This is the school where he trained and learned to please. 

This very modern spirit, turned towards the future, à la Diderot, does not drag scholarly chains after him; he does not have the superstition of Latin, the adoration of Greco-Latin legend. But he knows how to enjoy the past, and tastes true erudition, for example in the Abbe Auger, the translator of Demosthene, for who he pronounced an elegant funeral oration, at the Societe des Neuf-Souers, in 1792. At a time when the University no longer taught Greek, and perhaps for that very reason, Herault says true things about Demosthene, whom he judges as a politician as much as an artist. "The Revolution, he says, by developing our political ideas, made us appreciate the works of some ancients and enjoy all their genius, a measure which we lacked." 

He admires in the Greek orator "this proud and sensitive soul, which carries within it all the dignity and all the pains of the fatherland: this general movement, without which there is no popular eloquence, where the accessory relations, tightly packed, roll on high in periods which compensate for the extent of the ideas by the precision of the style.” But here, it is of himself that he thinks and it is his own talent that he designates when he says: "Never, above all, he never ceased to equal, by his efforts, this beauty, this continuous perfection of language, that happy mechanism, so familiar to the orator that he could not even cease to be elegant in the most impetuous apostrophes, in the most vehement outbursts: a rarer merit than one might think, because it is due to a particular kind of spirit, and mainly to the address which is the gift of multiplying the force by distributing it. Here we recognize Buffon's ideas on oratorical style. 

He himself had made up, for his own use, a kind of rhetoric which was found in his papers and which the Magasin encyclopedique published in 1795. These are practical precepts, recipes distributed without order, but which bear the mark of experience and whose interest is all the greater since Herault is the only orator of the Revolution to whom we owe a technique of his art. There is a question that first fascinated those who inaugurated the political forum in France: Should we read the speeches or say them? Both methods had supporters: some used them alternately depending on the circumstances. As for improvisation, even those who abandoned themselves to it seemed to excuse themselves for it as if it were negligence: so Herault, who by the way hardly improvised, only poses the alternative, read or say? - “It is only by speaking, he remarks, and not by reading, that one can make what one says truly perceptible, this is the custom of the lawyers of the Parliament of Bordeaux; otherwise, one flounders; the ideas relax, weaken and soon die out. This is what happens to M. de Saint-Fargeau: hence the easy word of most lawyers who are so fond of talking about business. To reconcile the need for a full and concise style with the other, I think you have to learn by heart. It is true that it is costly, but glory is at the end, and that is the way to surpass both those who speak and those who write." 

Memory is therefore the first part of public speaking. But how should one learn a speech? 

"I meditate on it, says Herault, the main idea, the accessory ideas, their number, their order, their connection, the plan of each part, the divisions, the subdivisions of each object. I dare to affirm that it is then impossible to make a mistake. If one forgot the speech, one would be in a condition to repeat it on the spot; and how much moreover the rhythmic sentences, a little ornamented, a little brilliant, in a word all that strikes the self-esteem of the one who must speak, are they not engraved in the memory with extreme ease!” 

"A very useful and very convenient procedure, to which you must get used to, to make up your mind quickly and to remember a multitude of ideas at the same time, is, when you have these ideas, to retain from each only the word that carries, and whose mere memory reproduces the entire phrase. Voltaire said somewhere: "The best words are the couriers of thoughts". Applying this adage here in another sense, I would say that you have to get your brain used to needing only head words [mot tetes] throughout the whole range of longer discussion." 

"To learn by heart, this word pleases me. There is, in fact, only the heart which retains well and which retains quickly. The slightest thing which strikes you in place makes you retain it. Therefore, the art would be to hit each other as much as possible."* 

*The French here reads: L’art serait donc de se frapper le plus qu’il serait possible. I genuinely have no idea if he means that we should be hitting each other with the force of our words … or actually physically hitting each other. Either could be possible with this man.  

"To write. The memory remembers better what it has seen in writing. Make it like a painting where one reads in the way that one speaks." 

"Memory is also aided by figures: thus count the number of things you have to learn, in a speech, for example." 

"I have also experienced that it was very useful for me to speak to remember a speech; I often tried to speak in public for an hour, and sometimes two, without any kind of preparation. I came out of this exercise with a singular aptitude, and it seemed to me in those moments that if I had had to give a speech, which I would have only read, I would have come out of it with a great advantage.” 

After memory, action seemed to him the most important part of eloquence. When he first started out as a lawyer, he had taken lessons from Mademoiselle Clairon. "Do you have a voice?" she asked me, the first time I saw her. A little surprised at the question, and moreover, not really knowing what to say, I answered: "I have one like everyone else mademoiselle. - Well! you must make one for yourself." Here are some of the precepts of the actress, which Herault tried to follow: "There is an eloquence in sounds: study above all to give roundness to your voice; so that there is roundness in the sounds, you have to feel them reflecting against the palate. Above all, go slowly, simple, simple!" She said to him: "What do you want to be? An orator? You must be one everywhere, in your room, in the street." She also gave this advice, purely scenic and bad for a speaker: "To dye the words with the feeling that they give birth to." 

Herault says that he constantly thought of Mlle Clairon's voice, and he characterizes his own manner by recalling that of his teacher: "She takes her voice from the middle sometimes softly, sometimes forcefully, and always in such a way as to direct it as she pleases. Above all, she often moderates it, which gives it the slightest brilliance that makes it shine. She goes very slowly, which contributes at the same time to furnishing the mind with ideas, grace, purity and nobility of style. I maintain that there is, in speech, as in music, a sort of measure of tones which helps the mind, at least mine. I have felt that going quickly offends and prevents the exercise of my ideas..." "... Do not believe that this is a real slowness. One disguises it, sometimes by force, sometimes by warmth that we give to certain words, to certain phrases. The result is a pleasing variety, but the bottom line is always serious and posed." 

Such was his concern to speak well that for a long time he compelled himself to declaim in the morning the fury of Orestes and the whole role of Mahomet, to the point of scratching his voice: in the evening he felt a strong diction, easy and varied. He neglected no means of training. 

He carefully studied the gesture itself. Clairon said to him: "Your type is nobility and dignity in the supreme degree. Very few gestures, but place them appropriately, and observe the oppositions which bring out the changes in gestures." He himself said: "The multiplied gesture is small, is meager. The broad and simple gesture is that of true feeling. It is on this gesture that you will be able to convey a great movement." These notes contain even more practical remarks on action: "It is important to be firm on the feet which are like the base of the body, and from which all the assurance of the gesture proceeds. One cannot practice too much in one's room to walk firm and well under oneself, legs on feet, thighs on legs, body on thighs, back straight, shoulders low, neck straight, head well placed. I noticed that in general, gestures become easier when the body is tilted. When it is straight, if the arms are long, there is a risk of lack of grace. The mid-length gesture is infinitely noble and full of grace. Don't wiggle your wrists, even in the biggest movements. Before expressing a feeling, make the gesture (1)." 

(1) The most technical remarks follow: "The soul of the arm is in the elbow ... It is in the elbow that the movement necessarily begins. - When you want to raise your arm, raise your elbows: let it be in general level with the hand. - Also open your arms. These open gestures open beside the body are better than those made in front of you. - By raising your elbow you round your arm. - Also lower your head to make it easier to raise the arms. The gesture is in the combination of the head and the arm. Raise the arm all at once, that is to say, the arm and the hand together. Make the gesture often before speaking: that there often remains an end which can still rise when you have spoken. Open and spread fingers announce astonishment, admiration, surprise; add to it also the elevation of the chest which expands to receive the idea that strikes it.”  

Finally, here is a piece of advice which reveals the secret of the disdainful grace with which he appears on the platform: "You must always seem to create what you say. You must command in words. The idea that one speaks to those inferior in power, in credit and above all in spirit, gives freedom, assurance, even grace. I once saw d'Alembert in a conversation at his house, or rather in a hovel, for his room deserved no other name. He was surrounded by cordons bleus,* ministers, ambassadors, etc. What contempt he had for all these people! I was struck by the feeling that the superiority of the spirit produced in the soul." 

*Cordon bleus are blue ribbons, i.e. members of an order of knighthood known as L’Ordre des Chevaliers du Saint-Esprit. 

This rhetoric of Herault, so ingenious, explains the pleasure of his eloquence; it also explains its weakness. This orator, so preoccupied with training himself, with raising his head, with rising to the height of the subject, does not have in him the sources of oratorical inspiration, always ready and from which a Danton, a Vergniaud, and even lesser haranguers, rise up. I don't believe that he lacks conviction, nor that we should believe in the words that Bellart attributes to him: "When we asked him what party he was from, he answered that he was from the one who doesn't give a fuck about the others." No, there was sincerity in him about his philosophical and political preferences. But he did not have that revolutionary faith which transfigured even the most miserable in times of crisis.  

In his Traite sur l’ambition, he distinguishes between male brains and female brains; I believe that he should be placed, whatever has been said of it, in the second of these two categories. 

[usergreenpixel]

JACOBIN FICTION CONVENTION MEETING 35: THE QUEEN’S FORTUNE (2020)

1. The Introduction

Well, hello there, Citizens! Neighbors too, since we have a figure who is interesting for both communities. Welcome back to the convention! Please leave weapons by the door cause you will need them later, take your seats and enjoy tea with tricolor cupcakes!

So, Allison Pataki is an author who will definitely become my nemesis in the future, considering her less than stellar work with this particular book (more on that later). Now, I knew from the ever so blunt (but lovely) @maggiec70 that it would be a bad book with about as much accuracy as your average conspiracy theory, but… BOY WAS I UNPREPARED!

The book turned out to be not bad. Not even mediocre. It’s straight up garbage fit only for wiping one’s ass when toilet paper runs out. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s dive deeper into this mess, shall we?

(By the way, I couldn’t find it online for free due to copyright but owners of Audible accounts can purchase the audiobook or you can pay for an ebook.)

2. The Summary

The book tells a story of Napoleon’s first fiancée, one Desirée Clary. She later would become the wife of Marshal Bernadotte and Queen of Sweden, whose descendants rule the country to this day.

Quite a fascinating story, if you ask me! Also, shoutout to @tairin for introducing me to Bernadotte as a historical figure (she is my guide to the Napoleonic era in general too). And to Maggie for bringing this novel to my attention.

Okay, the premise is interesting and extraordinary, isn’t it? But let’s see what the execution is!

3. The Story

Right off the bat, the story reeks of multiple inaccuracies (in both Frev and Napoleonic departments) worse than roadkill in summer heat. Inaccuracies that range from details (such as getting the year of convents closing wrong) to things that could’ve been avoided with one google search (such as Code Napoleon’s date or the timeline of Joseph’s rule of Naples). Also the usual Thermidorian bullshit with evil Robespierre and MODERATE THERMIDORIANS (because a group that includes war criminals is DEFINITELY MORE MODERATE THAN ROBESPIERRE AND CO, AMIRITE?!)

I know I usually don’t review media based on accuracy, but anyone with any knowledge about the topic (like me) risks getting a severe case of a broken brain from everything wrong in the book. This ended up hurting my immersion into the story because I had the urge to scream at my screen the entire time.

Another thing that hurts the narrative is the length. Personally, I found the story really overstayed its welcome and should’ve ended sooner, like after Desirée becomes Queen. But no, it drags on afterwards and the last chapters are basically filler, even more so than the rest of the book (which is a giant bore). The pacing just drags on like an old horse in slow mo.

(The story begins in 1789 and ends in 1860, for a reference.)

Last but not least, there is a very unnecessary and not accurate at all sex scene un the beginning of the book. Not only is that scene completely unnecessary for the story, but it also completely breaks suspension of disbelief and just makes the characters come off as modern cosplayers, not the people they’re supposed to be.

(For those in the back: DESIRÉE NEVER FUCKED NAPOLEON!!)

Okay, moving on!

4. The Characters

Bland. Most of them are blander than the BRAT diet.

Desirée Clary is the worst offender when it comes to characters feeling too modern, since the book is told from her perspective. She’s also a flat character and a bit too omnipresent when it comes to being at important events, even before her marriage to Bernadotte. We also don’t learn much about her as a person so there’s no reason to sympathize with her. Personally, I just didn’t care about her. She’s supposed to be someone who becomes a grown strong person throughout the story but we don’t see much character development to reflect this.

Napoleon Bonaparte is a bit more complex but that bar is low anyway. He definitely has his moments when he’s a jerk but can be a romantic. Also he kisses Desirée without her consent in the book during a game similar to Hide and Seek. Yeah, I wish I was kidding but he’s basically sexually assaulted her in that scene. Other than that, not much to see here either.

Josephine Bonaparte is more complex but still bland and almost saintly at times. Her flaws are severely downplayed or omitted.

The Bonaparte sisters are all catty cunts outright compared to the Furies in the book. Letizia suffers the same fate.

Joseph Bonaparte is a loyal brother and a nice man.

Julie is the doting big sister.

Bernadotte is a loving husband and an ardent Jacobin who has “Death to Kings” tattooed on his chest in the book. Yeah, that old chestnut that is actually nothing more than a myth.

And so on. It’s like a show with cardboard cutouts in lieu of a story with good characters.

5. The Setting

Some descriptions are quite vivid, especially when it comes to Malmaison, but that’s about the only good thing I can say about this book.

6. The Writing

Hoo boy… Remember how I said that the characters feel like cosplayers from modern times? Well, Desirée (in the book) uses gems like “I rooted for her”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure a bourgeois woman from that time wouldn’t know such words.

The dialogue in the book is mediocre due to the blandness of the characters and Pataki probably not giving two shits about delivering a good book, despite the fact that she is from a very rich and influential family and could’ve easily obtained access to all the research.

But hey, what do I know?

7. The Conclusion

Don’t read this book. Really, just don’t waste your time. I’m disappointed that the author took a good concept for a novel, wiped her ass with it and served the results in novel form.

I have my issues with that 1954 movie about Desirée, but, compared to THIS, that movie is a flawless masterpiece and at least there I felt some sort of way about Desirée as a character. Here, on the other hand, I just don’t give a shit, which is about the worst thing an author can achieve.

Anyway, to fit the theme of an extraordinary person the author was going for, here’s the promised song.

I hope you enjoyed the review and the song. Thank you for joining me today at the Jacobin Fiction Convention and stay tuned for future reviews!

Love,

- Citizen Green Pixel

[kuiperoid]

Optical Illusion: Perceptions of Race and Sexuality with Right-Wing Internet Personality Nick Fuentes, Part 3

[originally posted here]

Part 1, Part 2

The Gospel of Judas

There have been multiple references throughout this article to Fuentes’s former associate Jaden McNeil, but to understand the true depth of that situation, one must know who Jaden McNeil is and what he meant to both Fuentes and the America First movement. Simply referring to him as “Fuentes’s ex-associate” is greatly underplaying the role he played in Fuentes’s movement and life in general. The two were a veritable right-wing version of Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins and, as with that political friendship, it was not made to last. It ended, however, not at the guillotine, but in an ongoing online battle of insults and accusations.

Jaden Patrick McNeil was born to a modest background in a small town in Nebraska on May 17, 1999. He would go on to be a student at Kansas State University with the intention of one day becoming a lawyer. He proved quite effective as a conservative activist as the president of Kansas State’s Turning Point USA chapter, which would become one of the largest in the country. McNeil’s success with Turning Point led to invites to conservative conferences, including to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

For all of his success with Turning Point, McNeil found himself becoming disillusioned with the movement. In initial interviews, McNeil would say that it was because the stated views of Turning Point did not align with his own, such as being accepting of nonwhite immigrants so long as they arrived via legal routes. Later, he would state that he was disturbed by the number of older men at these events who appeared to be there to sexually prey on the college and high school-aged boys they knew would be present. At an event in 2019, Canadian white nationalist activist Faith Goldy introduced him to Nick Fuentes. The two began talking and McNeil felt he finally found someone he could see eye-to-eye with and be open with politically and, he would later say, a movement that he hoped would be less infested with predators than Turning Point. The connection was mutual as Fuentes would describe the meeting as “divine intervention,” saying that God intended for them to meet. McNeil’s fellow Turning Point associates were not as enthusiastic about their president’s new friendship and warned him that Fuentes was a “Neo-Nazi.” McNeil did not heed their warnings and stayed in contact with Fuentes. The two participated in some events together, such as when Fuentes publicly accosted Ben Shapiro, eventually culminating in McNeil founding America First Students, an extension of Fuentes’s organization aimed at college students, after McNeil resigned as president to Kansas State’s Turning Point chapter. 

McNeil’s continued association with Fuentes and statements online perceived as racially charged drew ire from some of the less conservative Kansas State student body. For example, he complained about Kansas State’s Ethnic Studies GE requirement and said that the Jennifer Lopez and Shakira halftime show at the Super Bowl displayed everything that he hated about immigration. This came to a head in June of 2020 when McNeil made a tweet “congratulating” George Floyd on being “drug free an entire month,” followed by a reference to the widely debunked claim popularized by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, of whom McNeil is a fan, that George Floyd’s death was the result of a drug overdose rather than being asphyxiation by the cop kneeling on his neck. This caused immediate public backlash, including calls for McNeil’s expulsion and a boycott by the Kansas State football team. McNeil was unapologetic and remained enrolled at Kansas State even as the outrage reached outside of the student body.

It is unclear what the final straw was, but McNeil was eventually expelled from Kansas State. Fuentes offered to let McNeil live in the basement of a building he had recently bought in Chicago free of charge while he acted as treasurer to America First. There were even discussions of him possibly moving forward to produce the show and act as a co-host in the future. In addition to his new position as America First’s treasurer, he became a gaming streamer to make ends meet.  McNeil would continue to participate in events with Fuentes for the next few years, even serving as a featured speaker at a few of them, such as anti-vaccine rallies, the next few AFPACs, the events  that preceded the January 6th storming of the capital, and even serving as Fuentes’s travel partner and videographer during the White Boy Summer Tour of 2021.

The image of the bond between Fuentes and McNeil was shattered in April of 2022 when McNeil made a post on Telegram announcing that he was resigning as treasurer to America First. He said that his political views had not changed but that it was not what he wanted in life at that moment, wishing everyone well. However, this would continue to unravel in the coming weeks as Fuentes’s associates began bitterly speaking about McNeil. His streaming channel was removed from Cozy without warning. Shortly afterward, McNeil appeared on Kino Casino, an Internet show that had often been critical of Nick Fuentes, along with fellow America First defector Simon Dickerman to discuss what led to their eventual departure. McNeil’s friendship with Fuentes was revealed to be far more fraught than previously presented. Issues arose between the two of them soon after McNeil moved to Chicago. Fuentes was painted as a controlling, paranoid narcissist who wanted more from McNeil as a friend than he was offering. He claimed that Fuentes became jealous of his relationships with girls and would feel hurt when McNeil would invite him to play video games with him as part of a group chat rather than reaching out to him individually. Many allegations arose, such as that Fuentes was using a multiplier to increase the number of views on his shows and building on the claims that he was a federal informant, but the most often-cited moment to Fuentes’s critics across the aisle seemed to be the allegation that he had posted in a group chat about searching McNeil’s apartment with a blacklight for traces of his semen on the bed and couch. This startling image portrayed of Fuentes was not invalidated by the May 10th, 2022 episode of his show in which he addressed McNeil’s appearance on Kino Casino, something he felt was explicitly done to hurt him. While he insisted that the story about him searching for semen was based on a joke he made about how unavoidable the stains on the furniture were when he went in to clean out the basement apartment out for the next tenant, he did not deny and in fact built upon the image of the demanding, co-dependent friendship he had attempted to forge with McNeil. The two hour stream included a monologue in which Fuentes he described all he did for McNeil - doxxing Kansas State students who had threatened him, moving him out to Chicago to get him away from a girlfriend he could not bring himself to break up with, cleaning his room when he was depressed, buying him soup and tea when he was sick with COVID, and more - while feeling he had received an insufficient reciprocity, something he had brought up with McNeil near the end of their friendship. It appears that he had expected more, alleging that McNeil frequently got in phone arguments with his mom with regards to his friendship with Fuentes. He portrayed the dissolution of their friendship as starting in December the year before due to how much time McNeil was spending with his new girlfriend. Fuentes appeared to be holding back tears multiple times during the stream as he described how devastated he was over the perceived betrayal and the love he still felt for his former best friend, holding out hope that they could someday make amends. It would have been easy to feel sorry for Fuentes; losing a friend is difficult for anyone, moreso when trapped in the right-wing emotional prison in which men cannot express emotions, certainly not love and heartbreak over platonic friends. That is, it would have been if not for what happened next.

As the weeks went by, the love and sadness were replaced with bitterness. Fuentes went on a trenchant spiel about how McNeil lacked intellectual depth when it came to media consumption compared to himself and wrote him off as “[his] former bitch.” It was clear the intentions to make amends with McNeil were gone as the accusations against him became increasingly bizarre and personal such as saying that he was a sugar baby to a high paying super chatter, was secretly transgender or intersex, and had attempted to nonconsensually kiss Fuentes while drunk. In keeping with Fuentes’s alleged grandiose self-perception, he took to thereafter referring to McNeil as “Judas” or sometimes “Judy” to allude at the gender ambiguity he was now accusing him of. In yet another unexpected turn, followers of Fuentes began publicly posting various unflattering photos of McNeil, purportedly meant to paint McNeil as an irresponsible alcoholic libertine. While he was drinking or smoking in a handful, in most, he was simply sleeping and did not necessarily appear to be passed out from alcohol consumption. Most of the photos appeared to be taken by Fuentes himself, namely one being a literal selfie he took with McNeil sleeping on a couch behind him. McNeil stated that he had no clue any of them existed and that they appeared to have been taken over the course of the three years that he and Fuentes knew each other. McNeil confessed that, while he knew saying so was “kind of gay,” that seeing these pictures made him deeply uncomfortable and made his “skin crawl.” In keeping with the response to Fuentes’s monologue about his loss of McNeil’s friendship, naturally McNeil was not going to permit himself to be seen as a man showing vulnerable feelings or other times when he likened Fuentes’s need for emotional validation as being “like a girl,” but even he could not help himself here and his viewers expressed sympathy, remarking that he had every right to “feel violated.” He questioned why Fuentes had taken them to begin with and what purpose they had served him in the years that he kept them before leaking them to the public, speculating that his intentions had been sexual in nature. Whatever the reason, one can generally consider nonconsensually photographing someone in their sleep and then posting those pictures publicly to be inappropriate, regardless of the nature of their relationship. With all the debates about whether or not Fuentes’s actions were “gay,” the subject of whether or not these actions would be appropriate in any situation has been overlooked.

McNeil had previously stated an intention to move on with his life and “get a blue collar job,” should his work with America First come to an end. However, Fuentes vowed to keep him from ever having a normal life or getting a normal job. This led McNeil to carry on as a streamer, primarily focused on conservative critiques of America First and Fuentes, such as his ideological inconsistencies, the federal informant rumors, and protecting alleged sexual predators connected to the movement, namely Ali Alexander whose antics McNeil says Fuentes was aware of. There are of course less refined critiques as well, such as vulgar references to Fuentes’s speculated sexual orientation, his supposed excessive pornography usage, and comments about Fuentes’s conception as the child of in-vitro fertilization, something McNeil views as unnatural and the cause for all of Fuentes’s bizarre personality traits. Fuentes would continue to directly or subtly reference McNeil in the months to come, making references of his own to McNeil’s lack of adequate masculinity and being the child of divorce. Both examples highlight a rightwing fixation on having been brought into the world from a proper beginning in an almost Calvinist view of predetermination. 

The two would not directly interact again until July of 2023 when McNeil called in to a discussion with LeafyIsHere to both defend his honor and bring to light the situation with Ali Alexander. Before the discussion even began, groypers poisoned the well for LeafyIsHere by leading him to the dox of the netizen whom they claimed was McNeil’s sugar daddy. During the call, Fuentes joined in, repeatedly questioning McNeil about his super chatter, taunting him about sexual acts the two presumably engaged in, and went on to repeat the claim that McNeil had attempted to kiss him once, this time adding a story about how it happened after the two of them saw Spiderman: No Way Home together in theaters. McNeil essentially broke down in frustration and left the call. Both on his show and on Kino Casino later, he claimed that LeafyIsHere had repeatedly muted him and denied having attempted to kiss Fuentes ever, let alone in the story he told. Perception by their respective supporters colors how these incidents were perceived. Unsurprisingly, groypers took Fuentes’s word at face value and McNeil fans did not. How they discuss these alleged interactions is obviously painted by these opinions and end up portraying them in entirely different lights. Over time, the respective supporters of these men have developed rather specific images of their alleged attraction to the other for being something denied on both sides. Once again, images of race and sexuality are at the center. McNeil fans present Fuentes as this evil, conniving gay Mexican attempting to sexually manipulate their pure, white heterosexual hero. Even left-wing Fuentes critics have fallen victim to this mindset that infantalizes McNeil, with more than one having referred to him as “the teenage boy [Fuentes] tried to groom,” as if he was not less than a year younger than Fuentes and a legal adult for the entirety of their knowing each other. Groypers emphasize McNeil’s lack of traditional masculinity in appearance, calling him a “twink,” and suggest he was attempting to seduce their dear leader, sometimes leaning into the sugar baby angle. A more confusing claim they cling to to is Fuentes’s allegation that one of McNeil’s grade school friends came out as came as gay as an adult, meaning that McNeil is likely gay by association; why someone who claimed he was his best friend as an adult and has been unnerved by gay rumors about himself would use this argument is unclear. Some take a third approach. Inevitably, the fact that Fuentes portrays one of McNeil’s fans as offering him an exorbitant amount of financial support as driven by sexual desire has caused some detractors to assume he is speaking from his own experience as his former employer and the provider of his home. The canard developed here is that McNeil was attempting to lead Fuentes on or even acquiesced to his supposed desires for financial gain before moving on to an older, more financially and emotionally stable sugar daddy. This still portrays Fuentes as a sniveling, pathetic  imp of a man driven by unnatural lust, while McNeil is portrayed as a monetarily predatory manipulator who cannot rely on his own means to take care of himself.

It is curious that both Fuentes and McNeil would bring up traits that they were clearly aware of from near the beginning of them knowing each other in their critiques of each other. In both instances, there is an attempt to rewrite their history. Fuentes has referenced being disappointed to learn that McNeil was not a celibate virgin like himself after he moved in, but he still remained friends with him after that, even continuing to provide him with a job and free housing. For all of McNeil’s jokes about Fuentes being Mexican, there is minimal chance he did not consider someone with the last name of “Fuentes” might be partially Latino, even if he somehow missed the streams where Fuentes actively referenced having a Mexican grandfather. His own jokes about Fuentes’s possible homosexuality are not only in reference to incidents that occurred while they lived in the same building or spent time together, but events that have become part of the general Nick Fuentes lore. Certainly, some of the cited events, such as Fuentes’s monologue about sex with women being “gay” happened after he and McNeil had parted ways, but McNeil’s references to the infamous “CatboyKami date” as if it was a shocking new revelation are rather confusing. The event in question happened at the end of 2019, the year McNeil and Fuentes got to know each other; in fact, the viewers of the entire stream can confirm that Fuentes made multiple references to his “friend Jaden” throughout the night, presumably referring to McNeil. It is difficult to imagine that McNeil did not hear about the stream, given he was getting involved with America First at the time and both right and left-wing detractors replied to nearly everything online related to Fuentes or his organization with taunting images and references to the stream, especially during the first few months of 2020. All of that and McNeil apparently did not consider it suspicious at the time, considering he moved into the building that Fuentes owned and became a more involved member of America First all after that happened.

One recalls him mentioning in the past that Turning Point members warned him about Fuentes and cannot help but consider that speculation about his sexuality was a part of that. Speculation about McNeil’s own sexuality was rampant during his association with America First, despite all of his confirmed relationships at the point of writing this being with women. Most of it was based on very little, some just remarking on his appearance and calling him a “twink.” One can find an older rumor spread around attaching a Freudian explanation to McNeil’s racial animus, saying he was sexually assaulted - ranging from a pantsing to a more violent tale - by a pair of black male students in the restroom while in high school, further adding to this image of him as on the receiving end of predatory sexual attention from men of color. Considering McNeil has stated that the town he grew up in was fairly homogenous and that he did not develop his ideologies until college, all versions of this tale seem deeply unlikely, but that did not stop it from gaining traction in the gutters of KiwiFarms and such. The exact birth of this rumor is unclear, but it did not appear to take hold until after McNeil was associated with Fuentes, further emphasizing how it was likely based more on the perception of him during that time than actual fact. Many rightwing detractors of Fuentes who have since become supporters of McNeil admit to having previously assumed he was his boyfriend. It is not difficult to find older posts on KiwiFarms and similar websites with lurid posts joking about what sort of sexual acts the two were speculated to have engaged in together. Even the hosts of Kino Casino had initially reported on the split between Fuentes and McNeil as a “break up” and made crude sexual remarks about the two of them prior to McNeil’s appearance on their show. Perhaps McNeil’s reaction now is a mix of regret that he did not listen to detractors sooner and a need to overcompensate for the rumors that spread about him as a result of his association with Fuentes. On that topic, Fuentes has himself appeared to attempt to change history as well. He has since tried to claim that he lost interest in McNeil as a friend after incidents of him trying to pressure him to drink and ultimately culminating in the alleged incident of him trying to kiss him after seeing a movie, despite them being not only publicly associated for four months after the fact, but Fuentes’s infamous sorrowful monologue was after all of that and complaints about the time McNeil spent with his girlfriend. One would think that he would respond to someone expressing unwanted romantic advances towards him proceeding to get a significant other would be met with relief and, if the alleged attempted kiss was so off-putting that it put an irreparable dent in their friendship, he would not mind the friendship formally ending, let alone be nearly brought to tears lamenting that end. 

It is difficult not to feel a semblance of sympathy for McNeil. Regardless of the reasons behind some of Fuentes’s antics, whether it was attraction, an attempt at control, or undiagnosed  neurodivergence-related social awkwardness, one thing that is for certain is that the way he treated him was professionally inappropriate at best and abusive at worst. When looking at McNeil’s older posts or listening to his stream to this day, between the provocative references to race and gender, there are some genuine frustrations about not having the opportunity to grow up in the same world generations before did, not unlike those of other young people of quite different political leanings. This is compounded when one remembers his working class upbringing, preventing him from accessing what positives remain. It is true that many of the most obvious scholarships and other assistive programs are focused on aspects of identity like race and gender, one can see how a young white man that still has all of the struggles of someone lacking resources would interpret this. As despicable as many viewed America First, it is easy to see how a desperate nineteen-year-old was drawn in. One cannot help but speculate, had events occurred a bit differently, that he would have instead been pulled into the Center for Political Innovation, a group that espouses left-wing, class-based politics with a strong criticism of identity politics, though declaring them capitalist constructions to divide the working class rather than a Jewish conspiracy to take down the white man. Of course, rather than addressing the antics of Nick Fuentes, he would instead have to reconcile with accusations of that group’s leader, Caleb Maupin, who would face questionable allegations of his own and a mass exodus from his movement in the middle of 2022. Finding an extreme political movement without members accused of inappropriate actions towards their underlings is becoming increasingly difficult. 

Class remains at the center of the struggle between these two. McNeil joined the movement so young and is now being kept from moving on with life by someone whose upbringing was far more comfortable than his own. McNeil criticizes Fuentes for his “unnatural” IVF conception, something that requires a great deal of money to undergo. Fuentes criticizes McNeil for having divorced parents when working class families are far more likely to experience divorce than wealthier ones. It is also undeniable that the dynamic between the two, even if it lacked the context of attraction that some allege was there, was deeply unbalanced and controlling. The two were attempting to navigate a friendship while Fuentes was also McNeil’s employer and provided his housing. Hearing McNeil’s voice crack as Fuentes went after him in that phone call, it is clear that imbalance remains. McNeil has jokingly talked about how odd it is that Fuentes continues to go after him, calling himself a “nobody.” For all of the criticisms McNeil has launched against his former boss and friend, one wonders if, at the end of the day, Fuentes convinced him that he was nothing without him and he still believes it. From an optical perspective, it certainly appears that way.

Conclusion

How to precisely define Nick Fuentes’s race and sexuality is a mystery to anyone aside from himself and even that may be up for debate. More important than whatever may actually be true is what is seen as true to his critics, something that varies by person and situation. In the end, Fuentes was correct in identifying optics as the most important factor of a movement. What is really there does not matter. All that matters is what people perceive. 

Sources

The initial pieces of research on Fuentes and his associates was discovered in articles by the SPLC, ADL, Mother Jones, and the Kansas Star. Much of the rest of the personal information was found from much less official sources, namely an Illinois-based Facebook group dedicated to outing the personal lives of the Chicco-Fuentes family to keep them from profiting financially on account of the son’s political involvement. Most of the information was from watching episodes of Fuentes and McNeil’s shows, both live and uploads on Bitchute, Odyssee, Rumble, YouTube, and the Internet Archive, as well as following their social media accounts on Twitter, Telegram, and Gab. The episode of Kino Casino that McNeil and Dickerman appeared on was helpful in assessing their views. Additionally, their interviews with others, as well as reaction videos by leftist streamers critical of them - including Shark3ozero, Vaush, and Creationist Cat - were also utilized. As for the commentary on the response by fans and critics, much was obtained from KiwiFarms and other websites dedicated to mocking Internet personalities. The anecdote about Martin Luther was based on the teachings of a deeply-influential, now-retired high school AP European History teacher. Everything else is based on the author’s own observations and opinions.

Bonus: The playlist I made to accompany this essay.

[muzzleroars]

Ight I hope you don't mind me putting this here but-

BAM!

This is my oc for your fallen gabe Au if that's alright!

His names Enoch (no relation to the book of Enoch) he's a throne angel so about one rank or two above Gabriel. Hence why his face is a bit more humanoid

Also side note he is a fallen angel of wrath but I haven't finished the drawing for that yesterday and this one's been done for awhile and I reaaallly wanted to show him off so I'll be talking more about him pre fall.

Basically after God's disappearance he was one of the founding members of the council (though not for long).

During the Sisyphus insurrection he lead the charge against Sisyphus unfortunately permanently loosing the use of his wings, rumor states that his wings were torn off by Sisyphus himself but the validity of this statement is iffy. Though it was confirmed they where torn off in the battle

Part of the reason he didn't get his wings back is because he's from one of the oldest generations of angels makeing his wings extra fragile (plus eh, more of a head cannon to me that angel wing are so fragile it's hard to heal them from terrible injuries like that)

Both before and after the Sisyphus insurrection though he was an avid believer in the "ferryman have paid for there sins" and to let them into heaven (part of the reason he's now fallen). He's also had a tendency to yell when he got angry (and he got angry a lot).

But the thing he's most famous for is haveing either A. Brought the idea of tearing the light from angels as a punishment to the council or B. Taught the council how to tear the light from an angel without God's assistance (like god had to approve of an angels light being torn from them before hand). But I'll let you decide whatever.

And he was all for this "tear the light" out of the heretics bodie's". At first the council didn't agree but once they realized how useful it was to keep people in check they also went full force on it.

Part of me is thinking he either went a bit Robespierre and went crazy with tearing the light from people he thought was heretics or he thought the council was going crazy with tearing the light from people (probably the ladder)

Eventually though the council got tired of Enoch yelling about how the ferryman should be forgiven. And whatever stance he had on the councils use of tearing the light out of people. and in turn used the very punishment he brought to the council against him, tearing the light from his body. Over the years heaven forgot about him and the council said he retired.

He became a fallen angel of wrath and there's a lot of ideas I have there but this is already a wall of text so I apologize. In short as a fallen angel of wrath he went a bit crazy from the constantly drowning.

Final notes,

He probably knew our favorite archangels, maybe interacted with Gabriel a couple of times from being on the council, and Raph from haveing lost his wings in the insurrection (the one patient he couldn't heal other then Micheal)but I don't think he was to to close to either of them. Part of me wants to think of Enoch as a kind of mentor to Uriel but that's up to you. I just think it would be neat since Enoch Pre fall and after the insurrection was a pretty decent guy typically spending most of his time trying to find ways to make heaven better overall, once haveing been this source of enlightenment turned into this monster of rage and anger.

It would probably hurt Uriel to see what Enoch becomes but not destroy him completely. But that's more for when I get fallen Enoch art finished.

Ight, thank you for dealing with my ramblings and this monster of an ask I just really wanted to show my boy off.

OOOOH i really like the idea that he introduced light being torn from angels and so, whether he knew it or not, he ushered in the age of the council's tyranny once they realized how useful this could be. tbh it's interesting to consider a council corruption arc, although i do think they were at least already halfway there just from assuming god's throne (they 100% encouraged michael to leave and i think that was the tipping point into "anything goes" for them to maintain power) also attached to the idea of a primordial angel, sort of one of lucifer's time, who were made before much of creation and act as advisers to all the younger sets (CUTE to have him know and work with uriel) makes it all the more intriguing in a character sense when the wiseman falls as an angel of wrath...falling deeper and deeper into that pit of concern over heresy, what he brought into heaven, and the denial of the repentant. poor guy ;o;

[breadvidence]

To the end of Les Mis '25 part III. Thoughts!

First, forgot to mention on part II: Valjean is robbed of two entire symbolic deaths (the Orion & the coffin heist), as per the usual. Do we have any film versions that keep the latter? I understand why it's cut, particularly for those versions that keep the tone somber throughout, but on the other hand: I want it.

I'm so fucking confused about Sandra Milovanoff playing adult Cosette? I'm even more fucking confused by the fact that Milovanoff forgot how to act. Where she was sharp as Fantine, she's vacant as Cosette. Huge miss in an otherwise solid film.

'25 takes the impoverishment and squalor of the Thénardiers in Paris and runs with it. M. Thénardier is undoubtedly a villain, but he's a pitiable one, bent-backed and raggedly-dressed; there's the faintest hint of comedy played up over his scamming, a little menace in how he treats his daughters, but the air is of the pathetic. He's changed enough I actually believe that Valjean wouldn't recognize him from their interactions eight years prior at the inn. There's physical comedy in Mme Thénardier's appearance (it's awful, derived directly from the novel, and haunts most adaptations--Hooper 2012 and BBC 2018 dodge this), but not much. Azelma and Éponine look like hell. I'm for it.

The film is still overall disinterested in politics, though when the Amis are introduced we are told that "A ces nouveaux contacts, Marius sentait s'élargir son esprit. Il comprenait que la VERITE ne réside pas uniquement dans le passé, qu'il y a de la FLAMME dans le présent et de la LUMIERE dans l'avenir." I can't recall a parallel to this in the novel nor found anything in a brief search; seems it's an overly optimistic interpretation of his character development in the Brick. Maybe the scriptwriter felt Combeferre's "to be free" had a different impact than how I read it. In any case, the film doesn't want us to think that Marius has remained a complete Napoleon simp. This might also be what's establishing his future involvement at the barricade, though I won't know 'til I watch part IV whether there's better development in this quarter.

Enjolras has a speech (no intertitles to indicate the content), after which we cut to a copy of Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen--dated 1792, with Robespierre's name featured in large font. I get the vibe, but feel like I'm missing something. I suspect a grasp on the French political scene in 1925 would help parse what's going on here.

Paul Guidé as Enjolras looks like an aging rock band frontman. Maybe someone with finer tuned senses for Amis could pick out who's who in the crowd around him--I think we cut to Grantaire drinking with ladies at an adjacent table?--but none are explicitly named or get to occupy camera center.

Congrats to '25 for dodging the incest bullet. The dynamic between Valjean and Cosette continues to be quite sweet and mutually attentive (we're probably benefiting from the fact that the filmmakers don't have the space to include flirtatious dialogue a la '35 and '52). Milovanoff comes back to life for brief flashes when interacting with Gabrio, particularly in the scene where Cosette fawns over Valjean's injury from the Gorbeau ambush (she then knocks back out to "reflect" on Marius, or--I assume that's what her face is trying to communicate is happening).

Unfortunately Marius and Cosette's courtship timeline is condensed--if I'm not mistaken? As they walk together at night in the garden there are intercuts with shots of the fountain and trees, and I'm uncertain whether these are meant to be understood as timeskips. I think not. Cosette comes across as unsettled where I think the intent is overwhelmed, and she lacks the boldness and charm of her characterization in the book. Can't say I'm enthusiastic over any of it. Why, Milovanoff?

Suzanne Nivette as Éponine is fabulous during the defense of the Rue Plumet. She's self-destructive, she's a little mad. The altercation becomes physical and loses me for a minute, but it's solid overall. I wish Marius had done a single thing to justify her investment in him, but he's treated her throughout as if she's something distasteful (which--I in fact entirely buy this version of Marius looking at her with condescension and disgust, but I think it's supposed to break into some flavor of kindness when he and Éponine first speak in his room; François Rozet flubs the delivery--he's a little vacant--and Nivette's performance is wasted; to be fair, Nivette is utterly fucking feral during that scene, and maybe threw him).

Did Toulout lose weight between parts II and III?? His face looks less blocky. Maybe they changed his makeup as part of the aging effect? Anyway, he's fun, solid Gorbeau ambush, you can tell they really wanted to add the hat line but couldn't fit it. Pause for Javert squad, Javert absent:

[alcarinquestar]

My Presentation on 93

Professors, friends, and esteemed guests,

I have the honour to present to you today an unparalleled book: Ninety-Three by Mr. Victor Hugo, whom we all recognise as a giant—not just of French letters, but of the world. To our great shame, although other works by Mr. Hugo are frequently read today, Ninety-Three, his last novel, has been largely forgotten; indeed, at this present moment no reputable publishing company is printing it in the English language.

I am here for the express purpose of reviving Anglophone interest in Ninety-Three. I consider this book a work of French Romanticism par excellence, for several reasons. First, it is an exercise of Hugo's literary theory, set forth as early as 1827 in the Preface to Cromwell, though never until now so perfectly demonstrated; second, in it we see the author’s reflections on a momentous point in history, the French Revolution, itself full of dramatic and philosophical potential. Additionally, the book is well-paced— which is perhaps the most difficult achievement of all for a work of this author. In sum, this book has everything that is required for a novel to ascend to the literary pantheon of the western canon: it has drama; it has depth; it is entertaining; it is true. Let us hasten, then, to place it where it deserves to be.

To understand the genius of Ninety-Three, one must understand the symbolic significance of its characters. But before I go any further, let us provide a general idea of the plot. In one sentence, it is a tale of the struggle between republicans and royalists in the Vendée (that is, Brittany), during the height of the Reign of Terror—hence the name, which is short for Seventeen Ninety-Three. Hugo divides the novel into three parts: At Sea, In Paris, and In la Vendée.

The story begins with a sort of prologue, an encounter between the republican Battalion of the Bonnet-Rouge and a Briton peasant woman and her three children, who are fleeing the war. They are quickly adopted by the battalion. We shall soon see why they are important. For the present our attention is redirected to the island of Jersey, an English possession, where a French royalist crew is preparing for a secret expedition. An old man boards the ship. He is in peasant dress, but by his demeanor seems to be an aristocrat. In the rest of At Sea we become acquainted with this jolly royalist crew—only to see them all perish in a naval battle before they ever reach the coast of France. Yet the old man escapes with the sailor Halmalo, and they land in Brittany in a little rowboat. He sends Halmalo off to rouse a general insurrection. Then, upon reading a placard, learns that his presence in Brittany has been known, and that someone named Gauvain is hunting him down, which sends him into a shock. Despite his dire situation, our protagonist is recognised by an old beggar named Tellemarch, who conceals him. We discover that he is none other than the Marquis de Lantenac, Prince in Brittany, coming back to lead the rebellion.

In the second part, In Paris, we are introduced to another character: Cimourdain. Cimourdain is a revolutionary priest, a man of iron will, with one weakness only: his affection for a pupil he had long ago, who was the grand-nephew of a great lord. At this period, however, Cimourdain dedicated himself completely to the revolution. Such was his formidable reputation that Cimourdain was able to intrude upon a meeting of the three terrible revolutionary men, Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, and cause his opinion to prevail among them. Robespierre then appoints Cimourdain as a delegate of the Committee of Public Safety, and sends him off to deal with the situation in Vendée. He is told that his mission is to watch a young commander, a ci-devant noble, named Gauvain. This name also sends Cimourdain into a shock.

Gauvain, in fact, is none other than the grand-nephew of the Marquis de Lantenac, in whose household the priest Cimourdain had been employed. Although they have not met for many years, there is a close bond between the master and pupil, and both adhere to the same revolutionary ideal. Hugo has set the stage. In the last part, In la Vendée, these epic forces are hurled against each other in the siege of the Gauvain family’s ancestral castle, La Tourgue. On the one side, we have the republican besiegers, Gauvain and Cimourdain, and on the other, the Marquis de Lantenac and his Briton warriors, the besieged. The Marquis has one last card to play: he has, as hostages, the children of the Battalion of the Bonnet-Rouge. For the safety of his party, he offers the life of the three children, whom he has placed in the chatelet adjoining the castle of La Tourgue, which will be burned upon attack. The republicans refuse. The siege begins, bloody for the republicans, hopeless for the royalists. At the last moment, by a stroke of fate the royalists contrive to escape, leaving behind an exasperated republican army, and a burning house. The republicans try to rescue the children, but find this impossible, as they can neither scale the walls of the chatelet, nor open the iron door that leads to it. As this is happening, the Marquis hears the desperate cries of the mother in the distance. Beyond all expectation, he returns, opens the door with his key, steps into the fire, and saves the children. Thereupon he is seized by Cimourdain, who proclaims that Lantenac will be promptly guillotined. Yet unbeknownst to Cimourdain, Lantenac’s heroic act of self-sacrifice set off a crisis of conscience in the gentle Gauvain, who fought for the republic of mercy, not the republic of vengeance. The final battle takes place in the human heart.

I will not divulge the ending. Already we can see that these characters are at once human, and more than human. “The stage is an optical point,” says Hugo in the Preface to Cromwell, “Everything that exists in the world—in history, in life, in man—should be and can be reflected therein, but under the magic wand of art.” Men assume gigantic proportions. They become ideas. The three central characters each represent a force. In the lights and shadows of their souls, we have symbols of the lights and shadows of a whole age. The fifteen centuries of feudalism, the Bourbon monarchy, the France of the past, when condensed into an object is the looming castle La Tourgue, and when incarnate is Lantenac. The twelve months of the revolutionary terror, the Committee of Public Safety, the France of the moment, is as an object the guillotine, as a man Cimoudain. The immense future is Gauvain. Lantenac is old; Cimourdain middle-aged; Gauvain young.

Let us look at each of these characters in turn.

I admit that Lantenac is my favourite character. In his human aspect he is impressive, and very compellingly written. Almost immediately upon introduction, he manifests a ferocious justice in the affair of Halmalo’s brother, a gunner who endangered the whole ship by his neglect, and who saved it in a terrifying struggle between vis et vir, between an invincible brass carronade and frail humanity. Lantenac awarded this man the Cross of Saint-Louis, and then had him shot. To the vengeful Halmalo, his justification is this: “As for me, I did my duty, first in saving your brother’s life, and then in taking it from him [...] He has failed his duty; I have not failed mine.” This episode sums up Lantenac’s character. True to life and true to the principle of romantic drama, Lantenac contains both the grotesque and the sublime, sometimes even in the same action. Like the Cromwell that inspired in posterity such horror and admiration, he shoots women, but saves children. He martyrs others, but is at every point prepared to be the martyr.

As an idea he is the ultimate embodiment of the Ancien Régime. Though himself unpretentious, Lantenac is perfectly aware of the role he must play. He demonstrates perfectly, unlike conventional aristocrats in literature, the principle of noblesse oblige and the justice of the suum cuique. He believes that he is the representative of divine right, not out of arrogance, but as a matter of fact. “This is the question,” he tells Gauvain in their first and last interview, “to be a Great Kingdom, to be the ancient France, [is] to be this magnificent land of system [...] There was something fine and noble in this system. You have destroyed it [...] like the miserable ignoramuses you are [...] Go! Do your work! Be the new man! Become pygmies! [...] But leave us great.” The force which animates Lantenac is his duty, merciless, towards the old monarchical order—until the principle was overcome by the man, who was still able to be moved by helpless innocence.

The first thing that Hugo felt it was necessary to know about Cimourdain is that he is a priest. “He had been a priest, which is a solemn thing. Man may have, like the sky, a dark and impenetrable serenity; that something should have caused the night to fall in his soul is all that is required. [...] Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out against a dark background.” There is an admirable purity about him: it is symbolic that we always see him rushing into the thick of battle, but never firing his weapon. He aids the poor, relieves the suffering, dresses the wounded. By his virtues he seems Christlike, but unlike Christ, his is an icy virtue, the virtue of duty, not love; a justice which knows not mercy—“the blind certainty of an arrow,” which imparts to this sublimity a touch of the ridiculous. It is a short step from greatness to madness. Still, there remains some humanity in Cimourdain, on account of his love for Gauvain. Through this love that he is able to live, as a man, and not merely as the mechanical execution of an idea.

On the surface Cimourdain has renounced his priesthood. But, Hugo reminds us, “once a priest, always a priest.” He is still a priest, but a priest of the Revolution, which he believes to have come from God. There is a similarity between Cimourdain and Lantenac, though they are on the two diametrically opposed sides of the revolution. Both are bound by duty to their cause. Both are ferocious. When Robespierre commissioned Cimourdain, he answered: “Yes, I accept. Terror against terror, Lantenac is cruel. I shall be cruel. War to the death against this man. I will deliver the Republic from him, so it please God." Quite appropriately he is represented by the image of the axe—realised in the guillotine erected in the final chapter. As with Lantenac, the Cimourdain of relentless revolutionary justice eventually finds himself face to face with the human Cimourdain, the spiritual father of Gauvain, the embodiment of mercy.

Gauvain at a glance seems to be a character of simple conception: his defining characteristic is an almost angelic goodness. He is also the pivotal point in the story: on one hand, he is the son of Cimourdain, a republican, and on the other, he is the son of the Gauvain family, Lantenac’s heir. Through him, we are reminded that the Vendée is a fratricidal war. Allusions abound in the novel, for example, when Cimourdain declared his brotherhood with the royalist resistors, a voice, implied to be Lantenac’s, answered, “Yes, Cain.” Gauvain finds himself caught in the middle of such a frightful war. At first, he was able to overlook his kinship with Lantenac, on account of the older man’s monstrosities, but with Lantenac redeemed by his self-sacrifice, it becomes impossible to ignore his threefold obligation: to family, to nation, and to humanity. It is because of this that duty, which seemed so plain to Cimourdain, rose “complex, varied, and tortuous” before Gauvain. The fact is, far from being simple, Gauvain's goodness is neither effortless nor plain, and we are reminded that the most colossal battles of nobility against complacency often happen in the most sensitive of consciences.

Indeed, the triumph of Gauvain is a triumph of the moral conscience, the light which is said to come from the great Unknown, over the dismal times of revolution and internecine strife, “in the midst of the conflagration of all enmity and all vengeance, [...] at that instant [...] when everything becomes a projectile [...], when [...] justice, honesty, and truth are lost sight of [...]” To Hugo, the Revolution is a tempest, in the midst of which we find its tragic actors, forbidding figures as Cimourdain, Lantenac, and the delegates of the Convention, some supremely sublime, some utterly grotesque, and many both: “a pile of heroes, a herd of cowards.” But, at the same time, “The eternal serenity does not suffer from these north winds. Above Revolutions, Truth and Justice reign, as the starry heavens above the tempest.” Gauvain finally comes to peace with this realisation, and we hear him saying, “Moreover, what is the tempest to me, if I have the compass? And what difference can events make to me, if I have my conscience?”

But Ninety-Three is, after all, a tragic book. We might ask whether it is not the case that Gauvain is too much of an idealist. He wishes to found a Republic of Intellect, where perpetual peace eliminates all war, and where man, having passed through the instruction of family, master, country, and humanity, finally arrives at God. “Gauvain, come back to earth,” says Cimourdain. To this Gauvain cannot make a reply. He can only point us upwards, by self-denial, and by his love, towards the ideal.

And the task of the novel is no more than this, this reminder of the reality of life. The drama was created, as the Preface to Cromwell declares, “On the day when Christianity said to man: ‘Thou art [...] made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, [...] one enslaved by appetites, cravings and passions, the other borne aloft on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie—in a word, the one always stooping toward the earth, its mother, the other always darting up toward heaven, its fatherland.’” And did not Ninety-Three achieve this? The legend of La Vendée, like the stage, takes crude history and distills from it reality. Let us conclude with this passage from the novel itself:

“Still, history and legend have the same end, depicting [the] man eternal in the man of the passing moment.”

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Frev friendships — Fouché and the Robespierre siblings

A circumstance relating to one of the most important crises of my life must here be mentioned. By a singular chance, I had been acquainted with Maximilian Robespierre, at the time I was professor of philosophy in the town of Arras, and had even lent him money, to enable him to take up his abode in Paris, when he was appointed deputy to the National Assembly.  Memoirs of Fouché (1825), volume 1, page 12. Fouché first arrived in Arras in 1788.

Robespierre didn’t like science, but he thought it useful for his vanity to research Fouché and to annoy him several hours per day in his office in order to acquire the reputation of scholar. Often, in order to appear intelligent, he interrupted his physics demonstrations to reproach him for being a materialist. Note written by Barère, probably shortly after thermidor. Cited in Fouché: les silences de la pieuvre (2014) by Emmanuel de Waresquiel.

Fouché’s first need […] was to tell me his entire life story, a recital that I find in my notes written down that very day as it seemed interesting for me to keep: […] I (Fouché) had known [Robespierre] since our youth, we had belonged to the same academy. I then had occasions to prove to him his inadequacy, a relative insufficiency because he was judged poorly. He had some talent, a strong, persevering will; simplicity, no greed; but he was all puffed up with a pride that I had humiliated. De 1800 à 1812. Un aide de camp de Napoléon. Mémoires du général compte de Ségar (1894), page 438. According to Robespierre (2014) by Hervé Leuwers, it would not appear Fouché joined the arrageois literary society Rosati of which Robespierre was a member, a claim which is nevertheless often invoked.

Fouché had shown the most ardent patriotism, the most sacred devotion since the beginning of the revolution. My brother, who believed him sincere, had accorded him his friendship and his esteem; he spoke to me of him as a proven democrat, and introduced him to me in praising him and asking me to give him my esteem. Fouché, after having been introduced to me by my brother, came to see me assiduously, and had those regards and attentions that one has for a person in whom one is particularly interested. Fouché was not handsome, but he had a charming wit and was extremely amiable. He spoke to me of marriage, and I admit that I felt no repugnance for that bond, and that I was well enough disposed to accord my hand to he whom my brother had introduced to me as a pure democrat and his friend. I did not know that Fouché was only a hypocrite, a swindler, a man without convictions, without morals, and capable of doing anything to satisfy his frenzied ambition. He knew so well how to disguise his vile sentiments and his malicious passions in my eyes as in my brother’s eyes, that I was his dupe as well as Maximilien. I responded to his proposition that I wanted to think about it and consult my brother, and I asked him the time to resolve myself. I spoke of it, effectively, to Robespierre, who showed no opposition to my union with Fouché.  Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834) page 122-123. Charlotte places the courtship in the midst of the revolution, which can hardly be accurate given the fact Fouché was already married by then, but it does sound likely for it to have happened somewhere between 1788 and 1790, when both of them were unmarried and lived in Arras.

When [Robespierre and I] again met at the Convention, we, at first, saw each other frequently; but the difference of our opinions, and perhaps, the still greater dissimilarity of our dispositions, soon caused a separation. One day, at the conclusion of a dinner given at my house, Robespierre began to declaim with much violence against the Girondins, particularly abusing Vergniaud, who was present. I was much attached to Vergniaud, who was a great orator, and a man of unaffected manners. I went round to him, and advancing towards Robespierre, said to him, "Such violence may assuredly enlist the passions on your side, but will never obtain for you esteem and confidence." Robespierre, offended, left the room; and it will shortly be seen how far this malignant man carried his animosity against me. Memoirs of Fouché (1825), volume 1, page 12

Lamartine, in the first edition of his Girondins, wrote the following: ”A very small number of friends of Robespierre and Duplay were one after another taken into this intimity: sometimes the Lameths; Le Bas, Saint-Just, always; Panis, Sergent, Coffinhal, Fouché, who liked Robespierre’s sister and who Robespierre didn’t like, Taschereau, Legendre, Le Boucher, Merlin de Thionville, Couthon, Pétion, Camille Desmoulins, Buonarotti, roman patriot… […]” On the placard corrected by the widow and son of Philippe Le Bas, these words are replaced by the following ones: ”The Lamenths and Pétion in the early days, quite rarely Legendre, Merlin de Thionville and Fouché, who liked Robespierre’s sister and who Robespierre didn’t like, often Taschereau, Desmoulins and Teault, always Lebas, Saint-Just, David, Couthon and Buonarotti.” Le conventionnel Le Bas: d’après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve (1901) page 83-84. This could be read as Élisabeth Le Bas confirming, or at least not denying, that there existed links between Charlotte and Fouché.

…The representatives of the people in Commune-Affranchie, using the powers entrusted to them for the surrounding departments, have already purged several administrations in the department of Allier. So consult with your colleagues by going to Commune-Affranchie. The instructions that Fouché has acquired relative to the department of Allier, where he resided for a long time, will be all the more useful to you since, animated by the same principles, the same effects must result from your common energy. Letter from the CPS to Petitjean, written by Robespierre, January 8 1794

The Committee of Public Safety decides 1, that citizen Reverchon immediately travels to Ville-Affranchie to organise revolutionary government and that he, together with Méaulle, takes all the measures that the interests of the republic need. 2, that the representative Fouché immediately travels to Paris to give to the Committee of Public Safety the neccesary clarifications about the affairs in Ville-Affranchie 3, that all procedurs against the popular society in Ville-Affranchie, and especially against the patriots that were subjected to persecution under the reign of Précy and the federalistes, are suspended. The representative Reverchon and his colleges will severely persecute the enemies of the Republic, protect the true friends of the Republic, help the patriots in need and assure the triumph of liberty through a constant and inflexible energy. Committee of Public Safety decree recalling Fouché from Lyon, written by Robespierre (and signed by him, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, C-A Prieur, Carnot and Barère) on March 27 1794

The Committee of Public Safety, alarmed by the fate of patriots in Commune-Affranchie, considering that the oppression of a single one of them would be a triumph for the enemies of the Revolution and a mortal blow to freedom, orders that all proceedings against the Popular Society of Commune-Affranchie, and particularly against the patriots who were persecuted under the reign of the federalists and Precy, will be suspended: it further orders that the representative of people Fouché immediately travels to Paris to give to the Committee of Public Safety the neccesary clarifications about the affairs in Ville-Affranchie. Committee of Public Safety decree recalling Fouché from Lyon, written by Robespierre (and signed by him, Collot d’Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, C-A Prieur, Carnot, Barère, Saint-Just and Couthon) on March 27 1794 (don’t know why there exists two seperate decrees)

I have since learned that the step I took opposite Robespierre - viz, of calling upon him - was attempted about the same time, and with as little success, by Tallien and Fouché, each of them on his own part. I have learned that their eloquence likewise struck against a determined deaf-mute, and that to all their gentle, forcible, friendly, respectful, and feeling words Robespierre vouchsafed no other answer than an obstinate silence, an expressionless physiognomy, and neither word nor sign. There is in a like silence, on the part of a man wielding the scep tre of death, something more fearful to the imagination than uttered threats.  Memoirs of Barras, member of the Directorate (1895) page 206

It is known well enough in what way [Collot and Fouché] conducted themselves [in Lyon]; it is known that they made blood flow in torrents, and plunged the second city of the republic into fright and consternation. Robespierre was outraged by it. […] I was present for the interview that Fouché had with Robespierre upon his return. My brother asked him to account for the bloodshed he had caused, and reproached him for his conduct with such energy of expression that Fouché was pale and trembling. He mumbled a few excuses and blamed the cruel measures he had taken on the gravity of the circumstances. Robespierre replied that nothing could justify the cruelties of which he had been guilty; that Lyon, it was true, had been in insurrection against the National Convention, but that that was no reason to have unarmed enemies gunned down en masse. From that day forth, Fouché was the most irreconcilable enemy of my brother, and joined the faction conspiring his death. I would only learn this later. Fouché never again set foot in my apartment, but I met him from time to time on the Champs-Elysées, where walked almost every day. He addressed me as if nothing had happened between him and my brother. When I learned that he was Maximilien’s declared enemy, I no longer wanted to talk to him. Despicable words have been spoken about me on the subject of that man, some have dared to say that I was his mistress before and after 9 Thermidor; this is an abominable calumny! Never did Fouché cease to have the greatest respect for me; and if in his discourse he had included any words tending to make me neglect my duty, I would have left him that very instant. Besides, Fouché had only sought my hand because my eldest brother occupied premier place on the political stage. That honorific of Robespierre’s brother-in-law flattered his pride and his ambition; to judge by that man’s conduct since, everything was a calculation with him, and, if he pretended to love me, that’s because he saw it was in his interest. What would have become of me if I had married such a being? Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834)

Robespierre murmured a lot about the forms that we had established in Lyon for the execution of decrees: he constantly repeated that there was no reason to judge the guilty when they are outlawed. He exclaimed that we had let the families of the condemned go free; and when the commission sent the Convention and the committee the list of its judgments, he was not in control of his anger as he cast his eyes on the column where the names of the citizens who had been acquitted were written. Unable to change anything in the forms of judgment, regulated according to the decrees and approved by the committee, he imagined another system; he questioned whether the patriots of Commune-Affranchie were not vexed and under oppression. They were, he said, because the property of the condemned being specially intended, by article IV of the decree of July 12, to become their patrimony, we had greatly reduced their claims, not only by not judging only a quarter of the number of conspirators identified by Dubois-Crancé on 23 Vendémiare, or designated by previous decrees, but also by establishing a commission which appeared willing to acquit two thirds, as it happened. Through these declamations Robespierre wanted to entertain the patriots of whom he spoke, with the most violent ideas, to throw into their minds a framework of extraordinary measures, and to put them in opposition with the representatives of the people and their closest cooperators: he made them understand that they could count on him, he emboldened them to form all kinds of obstacles, to only follow his indications which he presented as being the intentions of the Committee of Public Safety.   Collot d’Herbois’ explanation of Robespierre’s dislike for his and Fouché’s Lyon activities in Défense de J-M. Collot, répresentant du peuple. Éclaircissemens nécessaires sur ce qui s’est passé à Lyon (alors Commune-Affranchie), l’année dernière; pour faire suite aux rapports des Répresentants du peuple, envoyés vers cette commune, avant, pendant et après le siège (1794), somewhat the polar opposite of Charlotte’s version.

Robespierre accused Fouché of having dishonored the Revolution by exaggerating all measures and erecting atheism as a doctrine. ”No, Fouché," he said to him in the hall of the Jacobins, ”death is not an eternal sleep." Besides, to use his own expression, he believed he "held him in his power in the matter of honesty,” as Fouché had been charged with not having been any too strictly faithful on the occasion of his mission to Lyons, where, outstripping his epoch in those early days, he was believed to have enjoyed a foretaste of that corrupt century. Reports, possibly mendacious, had reached Robespierre, according to which Fouché is said to have, in the midst of the demolition of the dwellings in the town doomed to endure his cruelty, behaved somewhat like the incendiaries who carry on their business by the light of the flames. It is that which caused Robespierre to assume so lofty a manner against Fouché, because Fouché was supposed to have begun "to make money" at a time when no one in the Republic had so far dreamed of doing such a thing, either because of the Terror, which was not disposed to indulgence towards thieves, or because of a sentiment of genuine honesty which dominated men whose sole thought was the defence of the Republic.  Memoirs of Barras, member of the Directorate (1895) page 208-209

Fouché reads a report regarding Commune-Affranchie, where he was sent. After having brought up the slander repeated against the representatives sent to this commune, he proves by several observations the need of the measures that they took and the punishments that they handed out. He proves that the blood of crime fertilizes the soil of liberty and consolidates its power on unshakeable foundations. He also develops through much reflection the measures he was obliged to take in the last moments.

A citizen demands the floor in order to speak against Fouché.

Robespierre, after having declared that Fouché’s report is incomplete, pays homage to the patriotism of this representative and to the citizen who presented himself to speak against him. He presents some observations on what has gone down in Commune-Affranchie, and announces that the patriots, the friends of Chalier, and the companions of his suffering have been too modest against the schemers who put themselves in their place, and who introduced themselves among the patriots sent from Paris. He protests that without the schemers, the true patriots already would have plunged the whole conspiracy into nothingness. He recognizes that they have legitimate complaints to make, but he assures that the Committee of Public Safety, which is aware of them, has taken all the necessary measures to establish liberty in these unfortunate countries. Consequently, he invites the patriot who wants to speak, to put aside any kind of bitterness, to develop the facts and to give the knowledge that he considers useful. 

I recognize, says this citizen, the validity of the principles of Robespierre, you will subsequently know all the facts. The truth will pierce through all the clouds; I’m backing down. (applauds) Robespierre and Fouché at the Jacobins, April 8 1794

Sure of having sown the seed, I had the courage to defy [Robespierre], on the 20th Prairial (June 8 1794), a day on which, actuated with the ridiculous idea of solemnly acknowledging the existence of the Supreme Being, he dared to proclaim himself both his will and agent, in presence of all the people assembled at the Tuileries. As he was ascending the steps of his lofty tribune, whence he was to proclaim his manifesto in favour of God, I predicted to him aloud (twenty of my colleagues heard it) that his fall was near.  Memoirs of Fouché (1825) page 20

A deputation from the Society of Nevers presents itself at the tribune in order to repel charges directed against it. After having summarized the things done for the public sake by the Society which has sent him, the orator announces that the patriots have their souls broken and compromised in Nevers, because of atrocious persecutions of which they are every day the unfortunate victims.

Fouché (currently serving as president of the Jacobins): Your society deserves severe reproaches. If it is true to say that the impure breath of Chaumette could not exert its disastrous influence there during his stay in Nevers, it seems at least certain that the shadow of this conspirator hovers there today. Imprisoned suspects were released, and your Society made no complaint. Ardent and pure patriots, true sans-culottes, were slandered by federalist lawyers, and your Society remained silent. Finally, its correspondence is insignificant, it is null. As the Jacobins do not know how to disguise any truth, I make it my duty, on their behalf, to point out some false and very weak ideas that you have just expressed. The patriots, you say, have their souls compromised at this moment in Nevers. Citizens, strong hearts can never be compromised; Republicans know how to die for the truth as well as for liberty, and the perfidious person who tells you that he is not free to express his thoughts is a coward; the crime is in his heart, he complains of not being able to produce it. You hand us, as proof of your opposition to the maxims of the conspirators, the celebration that you are preparing for the Supreme Being; but in this you are only obeying the impulse given to nature. Add to this natural impulse the strength and courage to dedicate yourself to the defense of patriots and the annihilation of their oppressors; the exercise of democratic virtues. Brutus paid homage worthy of the Supreme Being by bringing the blade into the heart of the one who conspired against the liberty of his homeland.

I don't know, says Robespierre immediately, if the Society understood the motive and the object of the approach of the members of the Society of Nevers; I ask if the president's response can shed some light on this point. For my part, I assure you that I don't understand anything about it. If the president knows everything that concerns morals, it is his duty to explain. Everyone knows that Nevers was one of the main centers of the conspiracies hatched by Chaumette, in concert with the supporters of the foreign faction. We must remember that he abandoned his post as national agent, near the Paris Commune where he appeared to play a major role, to go, under a frivolous pretext, to plot in the commune of Nevers: it is important that we learn from what we were able to discover on such a journey. I ask that the president explain his response to us, and tell us frankly what he thinks.

Fouché takes the floor to give clarifications. He announces that, having served as representative of the people in the department of Nièvre at the time when the scoundrel Chaumette arrived in Nevers under the pretext of enjoying the native air, he didn’t hear from his mouth any counterrevolutionary expression; that he only saw him while in public, that, the popular society believing this Chaumette to be a zealous defender of liberty, it took him in without difficulty and without defiance. Fouché thinks that this immoral man hid away, because he saw the constitutional authorities strongly attached to good principles, and that he conspired in secret, and then returned to Paris to there continue his execrable profession of assassin of all public and private morality. As for the deputation that has just been heard, Fouché declares that, as the Society of Nevers has been indirectly attacked, it will send a deputation of its members to respond to the imputations that have been made against it, that there was a time when suspicious people, arrested, then released, and finally imprisoned again, managed to obtain an arrest order against the patriots. “This,” he says, “is all I know; I reproached the deputation on the weakness of the letters written by the Society of Nevers, and on the insignificance of its correspondence. The deputation presented its address to me when it entered, and it is on that I’m basing my answer.

Robespierre is surprised that the president and the delegation only say insignificant things that cannot enlighten the Society. He declares that Chaumette having hatched his plots in Nevers, it is impossible that neither the representative nor the Société populaire had knowledge of some of the maneuvers he employed. He recalls that at the moment when the Convention took a vigorous decision against the infernal plot of Chaumette, the Society of Nevers sent the Convention an address in which the decree was faulted.

Fouché observes that this adress wasn’t from the Society of Nevers, but from that of Moulins.

Robespierre replies that the latter is right next to to the other, that both corresponded to each other and that the information must have been the same; he continues by maintaining that the Society is isn’t instructed by the details that have just been given to it, and one has not sufficiently characterized the men who are called patriots, and those who are declared triumphant aristocrats. He is surprised to hear congratulations on the decree issued yesterday, mixed with observations presented by the Society of Nevers, as if this society could be aware of this decree. It is not by sentences, as he observes, but by conduct and facts that one must judge men: instead of stopping at the language of the deputation, one must ask the Society of Nevers if it fought Chaumette and foiled his horrible schemes? Very often the greatest enemies of the people use republican expressions, to better deceive unsuspecting citizens. It is not a question, he says, of throwing mud on the grave of Chaumette, when this monster has already perished on the scaffold. For a long time people have done evil while speaking the language of republicans. Today someone is spewing imprecations against Danton, who until recently was his accomplice. There are others who appear all fired up to defend the Committee of Public Safety, and who then sharpen daggers against it. The enemies of liberty have retained the same audacity, they have not changed their system; they do not want to appear to separate themselves from the patriots; they praise and flatter them; they even make vague imprecations against tyrants, and at the same time they conspire for their cause! It is to their friends the conspirators that they give the name of patriots; and it is the latter that they designate by the name of aristocrats: they surround the Committee of Public Safety and the representatives of the people only to intrigue, to lead them astray and thus destroy the Revolution. There are still two parties within the Republic: on the one hand patriotism and probity; on the other, the counter-revolutionary spirit, the crookedness and the improbity which are bent on the ruin of empires and the virtue of humankind. Patriots, you who in the career of the Revolution have only sought the public good, you who did nor go into it to serve a criminal faction, be more than ever on your guard; evil men use all imaginable artifices to destroy the Convention and slaughter the defenders of the homeland. Do not fall asleep in a false security, do not abandon the Convention and the government of which it is the center: let courageous voices be raised to make the truth known, stifle the clamors of the intriguers who surround us daily, who change patriotism into aristocracy, and reciprocally aristocracy into patriotism. Do not tire of instructing us, rest assured that the wish to sacrifice ourselves for all patriots is always deeply engraved in our hearts, that we are resolved to defend persecuted virtue with all our power, and to fight with strength and constancy the enemies of liberty and patriotism. This is the wish that I address, on behalf of the representatives, to the oppressed patriots; it is not natural that we remain indifferent on their account: the first of the republican virtues is to watch over innocence. Pure patriots, one is waging a war to the death against you, save yourselves, save with you all the friends of liberty. 

Robespierre’s speech is followed by the liveliest applause.

Fouché observes that he hasn’t wanted to reproach the Society of Nevers for not having denounced Chaumette. This society didn’t know him as a conspirator, it wouldn’t have been late to accuse him warmly, had it suspected him of this. Robespierre and Fouché at the Jacobins, June 11 1794

Five days after (June 12) in full committee, [Robespierre] demanded my head and that of eight of my friends, reserving to himself the destruction of twenty more at a later period. How great was his astonishment, and what was his rage, upon finding amongst the members of the committee an invincible opposition to his sanguinary designs against the national representation! It has already been too much mutilated, said they to him, and it is high time to put a stop to a deliberate and progressive cutting-down, which at last will include ourselves. Finding himself in a minority, he withdrew, choked with rage and disappointment, swearing never to set foot again in the committee, so long as his will should be opposed. He immediately sent for St. Just, who was with the army, rallied Couthon under his sanguinary banner, and by his influence over the revolutionary tribunal, still made the Convention, and all those who were operated on by fear, to tremble.  Memoirs of Fouché (1825), volume 1, page 20

Robespierre: The example of Commune-Affranchie can explain a theory that I have already noted. The patriots defend the patriots with all their means; they give no rest to the intriguers and traitors, they constantly badger and fight them; aristocrats do precisely the opposite. I knew Chalier at a time when the patriotic representatives of the people were themselves persecuted. It was he who first discovered Roland's perfidy, and denounced him to me for keeping an immense store of libels at his home, directed against the Mountain and against me. Chalier had no sooner known this conspiring minister than he abandoned him and renounced the justice he had come to demand from him, not wanting to owe anything to a traitor who sought to ignite civil war in France. 

[Robespierre] adds that since this moment he has only known Chalier through the acts of heroism and virtue which immortalized his name. The enemies of the people were only able to establish their triumph through the assassination of this man, as patriotic as he was intrepid. He recalls the courage of this republican at the time of his torture, prolonged by the villainy of the aristocrats of Lyon who brought the ax down on his head four times, which he raised each time, crying out in a dying voice: Long live the Republic, attach the cockade to me.

After this touching story, Robespierre goes into detail about the services rendered by Chalier's friends; he knows them all, he also knows their persecutors. The fate of the former was to be oppressed by all the factions that succeeded one another. They opposed these tyrannical and unprecedented vexations with a calm and patience of which it is impossible to find an example in the history of any people.

When the overly prolonged siege of Lyon was over, and this commune had been returned to the power of the Republic, the friends of Chalier were not restored to the goodness that they had so well deserved by their constant virtue. One took care to make sure Précy and all the other conspirators escaped, although one went so far as to making the trick of the Committee the supposed remains of this monster. The gate of Lyon was opened to them at the very moment when the Republican army entered, and they left through the gate where the army corps commanded by Dubois-Crancé was, which remained motionless.

Another cause of the impunity of the conspirators is that national justice has not been exercised with the degree of force and action that the interests of a great people require and command. The temporary commission initially displayed energy, but soon it gave way to human weakness which too soon tires of serving the homeland, and it lost with all its courage, its devotion and its purity. After having given in to the insinuations of the perverse aristocrats, the persecution was established against the patriots themselves: the cause of this criminal change can be found in the seduction of certain women, and it is to these terrible maneuvers that we can attribute the despair that led Gaillard to kill himself.

Reduced to escape, the patriots come to submit their complaints to the Committee of Public Safety, which rescues them from persecution, and suppresses their odious persecutors with fear. Thus, virtue will be eternally exposed to the traits of two factions which, opposed in apperance, always rally to sacrifice the patriots. Here [Robespierre] swears to avenge Chalier, Gaillard and all the victims of the infamous aristocracy.

The speaker's principles are to stop the shedding of human blood caused by crime: the authors of the plots denounced, on the contrary, only aspire to immolate all patriots and especially the National Convention, since the Committee indicated the vices from which it must purge itself. Who are those who have constantly distinguished error from crime, and who have defended lost patriots? Isn’t it the members of the Committee? Those who demand justice can only be formidable to the leaders of the factions, and those who want to destroy the members of the Committee in public opinion can have no other intention than to serve the projects of the tyrants interested in the fall of a Committee which disconcerts them and will soon destroy them.

Robespierre ends by denouncing the author of all these maneuvers who is the same one who persecuted the patriots at Commune-Affranchie, with a cunning, a perfidy as cowardly as it is cruel: the Committee of Public Safety was not his dupe. He asks, finally, that justice and virtue triumph, that innocence be peaceful and the people victorious over all their enemies, and that the Convention puts all petty intrigues under its feet.

Couthon, who had interrupted Robespierre in order to cite charges against Dubois-Crancé regarding the siege of Commune-Affranchie, proposes that he be struck from the club’s list of members (adopted).

At the suggestion of Robespierre, Fouché is invited to come and exonerate himself of the reproaches which have been addressed to him before the Society. Robespierre at the Jacobins, July 11 1794

One reads a letter from Fouché, in which he asks the Society to suspend their judgement up until the Committees of Public Safety and General Security have made their report on his private and public conduct.

Robespierre: I begin by making the declaration that I am not interested in the individual Fouché at all. I could be connected to him because I thought him a patriot. When I denounced him here, it was less because of his past crimes than because he hid away in order to commit others, and because I regarded him as the leader of the conspiracy which we have to thwart.

I examine the letter which was just read out, and I see that it is written by a man who, being accused for crimes, refuses to justify himself before his fellow citizens. This is the beginning of a system of tyranny. He who refuses to answer to a Popular Society whose member he is, is a man who attacks the institution of Popular Societies. This contempt for the Society of the Jacobins is all the more inexcusable as Fouché himself has not refused his suffrage when he was denounced by the patriots from Nevers, and as he even took refuge on the [president’s] seat of the Jacobins. He was placed there because he had agents in this Society, who had been at Commune-Affranchie. He delivers a great speech to you on his conduct in the mission with which he had been charged. I will not seek to analyse this speech. The Society has judged that Fouché does not want to say anything, as his reflections are insignificant.

It is surprising that the one who, at the time of which I speak, craved the approval of the Society, neglects it when he is denounced, and that he seems to implore, so to speak, the aid of the Convention against the Jacobins. Does he fear the eyes and ears of the people? Does he fear that his sad face visibly presents crime, that six thousand looks fixed on him discover his entire soul in his eyes, and that, in spite of nature which has hidden them, one reads his thoughts there? Does he fear that his speech reveals the embarrassment and the contradictions of a culprit? A reasonable man has to judge that fear is the only motive of Fouché’s conduct ; well, the man who fears the looks of his fellow citizens is a culprit. He uses [the fact] as a pretext that his denunciation is sent to the Committee of Public Safety ; but is he forgetting that the tribunal of the public conscience is the most infallible? Why does he refuse to present himself here?

The obligation to give an account of his mission to the Committees of Public Safety and of General Security, which are the government, and to the Convention, which is its source or, rather, which is the government by definition, this obligation, I say, does not destroy the one of appearing respectable in the eyes of a Society, and does not excuse appearing to put it in contradiction with the Convention. A representative is responsible for his actions to the Convention; but a good citizen does not discard appearing before his fellow citizens. If the system of Fouché could dominate, it would follow that those who have denounced schemes outside of the Convention have committed a crime. This was the conduct of all conspirators, who, from the moment onwards when one has wanted to judge them, shunned this Society and denounced it to the different National Assemblies as a gathering of factious [persons].

I here call Fouché into judgement. He shall respond and he shall say who, among him and us, has borne the rights of the representatives of the people with more dignity, and struck down all factions with more courage? Was it him who unveiled the Héberts and the Chaumettes, when they hatched assassination plots and wanted to debase the Convention? No! It was us who, on this tribune, when the Hébertists claimed to be more patriotic than us, unmasked them openly. It was us who silenced the false denunciations.

They shall say if they would have been listened to here, these men who had only served the Revolution in order to dishonour it and to make it turn to the benefit of the foreign [powers] and of the aristocracy! All the vile agents who have conspired did not see their likes unveiled and punished sooner than they seemed to abandon their cause ; and, because we had dismissed the perfidiously spread calumnies against the Convention, they extended this principle onto themselves in such a way as to render it tyrannical. The slightest words against this kind of men have been regarded as crimes by them; terror was the means which they used in order to force the patriots into silence. They threw those into prison who had the courage to break it; and this is the crime for which I reproach Fouché!

He will not say that it were the principles of the Convention that he has professed ; the intention of the Convention is not to throw terror into the soul of the patriots, nor to carry out the dissolution of the Popular Societies. Which means would thus remain to us, if, while plotters conspire and prepare daggers in order to assassinate us, we could not speak in the presence of the Friends of Liberty?

Robespierre then declares that Fouché is a vile and despicable impostor ; that his move is the confession of his crimes and that the action which he takes is similar to the one of the Brissots and of the other crooks who slander the Society as soon as they are chased from it. He assures that virtue will never sacrificed to baseness, nor [will] liberty [be sacrificed] to men whose hands are full of rapines and crimes. I do not want to add anything, he says while closing; Fouché himself has characterised himself enough. I have made all these observations, so that the conspirators know once and for all that they must never hope to escape the surveillance of the people. 

A citizen from Commune-Affranchie reports some serious facts against Fouché. The Society sends them to the Committee of Public Safety and, upon the motion of a member, Fouché is excluded from the Society.

The citizens Tolède and Dessyrier, who found themselves at Commune-Affranchie in the days of Fouché, and who claim to be accused, mount the tribune. 

Robespierre observes that these two citizens divert, without wanting it, the attention away from Fouché, and that his cause must not be common with theirs. He recalls that the conspirators have always sought to save themselves by placing themselves beside pure patriots ; he hence invites Tolède and Dessyrier not to interrupt a discussion wherein they are not involved. – After members did justice to the patriotism of these citizens, they descend from the tribune. Robespierre at the Jacobins, July 14 1794

They are strange accomplices of Robespierre, those who, against his will, made a political report on the religious troubles, sheltered from all research in this matter the representatives of the people sent on mission in the departments, defended Tallien, Dubois-Crance, Fouché, Bourdon de l'Oise, and other representatives whom he relentlessly pursued. Réponse des membres des deux anciens Comités de Salut Public et de sûreté générale aux imputations renouvelées contre eux par Laurent Lecointre, de Versailles, et déclarées calomnieuses par décret du 13 fructidor dernier, à la Convention Nationale (1795) by Barère, Collot d’Herbois, Vadier and Billaud-Varennes

One man alone in the Convention appeared to enjoy an inexpugnable popularity: this was Robespierre, a man full of pride and cunning; an envious and vindictive being, who was never satiated with the blood of his colleagues; and who, by his capacity, steadiness, the clearness of his head, and the obstinacy of his character, surmounted circumstances the most appalling. Availing himself of his preponderance in the Committee of Public Safety, he openly aspired, not only to the tyranny of the decemviri, but to the despotism of the dictatorship of Marius and Sylla. One step more would have given him the masterdom of the revolution, which it was his audacious ambition to govern at his will; but thirty victims more were to be sacrificed, and he had marked them out in the convention. 

He well knew that I understood him; and I, therefore, was honoured by being inscribed upon his tablets at the head of those doomed to destruction. I was still on a mission, when he accused me of oppressing the patriots and tampering with the aristocracy. Being recalled to Paris, I dared to call upon him from the tribune, to make good his accusation. He caused me to be expelled from the Jacobins, of whom he was the high-priest; this was for me equivalent to a decree of proscription. I did not trifle in contending for my head, nor in long and secret deliberations with such of my colleagues as were threatened with my own fate. I merely said to them, among others to Legendre, Tallien, Dubois de Crancé, Daunou and Chénier: “You are on the list, you are on the list as well as myself, I am certain of it!” Tallien, Barras, Bourdon de l'Oise and Dubois de Crancé evinced some energy. Tallien contended for two lives, of which one was then dearer to him than his own: he therefore resolved upon assassinating the future dictator, even in the Convention itself. But what a hazardous chance was this! Robespierre’s popularity would have survived him, and we should have been immolated to his manes. I therefore dissuaded Tallien from an isolated enterprise, which would have destroyed the man, but preserved his system. 

Convinced that other means must be resorted to, I went straight to those who shared with Robespierre the government of terror, and whom I knew to be envious or fearful of his immense popularity. I revealed to Collot d'Herbois, to Carnot, to Billaud-Varennes, the designs of the modern Appius; and I presented to each of them separately, so lively and so true a picture of the danger of their situation, I urged them with so much address and good fortune, that I insinuated into their breasts more than mistrust, but the courage of henceforth opposing the Tyrant in any further decimating of the Convention.  "Count the votes,” said I to them, “in your committee, and you will see, that when you are determined, he will be reduced to the powerless minority of a Couthon and a Saint-Just. Refuse him your votes, and compel him to stand alone by your vis inertiæ.” But what contrivances, what expedients were necessary to avoid exasperating the Jacobin club, the Seides, and the partisans of Robespierre. 

My eye was on him; and seeing him reduced to a single faction, I secretly urged such of his enemies who still clung to the committee, at least to remove the artillery from Paris, who were all devoted to Robespierre and the Commune, and to deprive Henriot of his command  or at least to suspend him. The first measure I obtained, thanks to the firmness of Carnot, who alleged the necessity of sending reinforcements of artillery to the army. As to depriving Henriot of his command, that appeared too hazardous; Henriot remained, and was near losing all, or rather, to speak the truth, it was he, who on the 9th Thermidor (the 27th July) ruined the cause of Robespierre, the triumph of which was for a short time in his power. But what could be expected from a drunken and stupid ci-devant footman. 

What follows is too well known for me to dwell upon it. It is notorious how Maximilian the First perished; a man whom certain authors have compared to the Gracchi, to whom he bore not the slightest resemblance, either in eloquence or elevation of mind. I confess that in the delirium of victory, I said to those who thought that his views tended to the dictatorship: "You do him too much honour; he had neither plan, nor design: far from disposing of futurity, he was drawn along, and did but obey an impulse he could neither oppose nor govern." But at that time I was too near a spectator of events justly to appreciate their history. The sudden overthrow of the dreadful system which suspended the nation between life and death, was doubtless a grand epoch of liberty; but, in this world, good is ever mixed with evil. What took place after Robespierre's fall? that which we have seen to have been the case after a fall still more memorable. Those who had crouched most abjectly before the decemvir, could, after his death, find no expression strong enough to express their detestation of him.  Memoirs of Fouché (1825), volume 1, page 18-22

…The fact is that, sent [to Lyon], after the sack of this city, I (Fouché) returned in revolt, with a report against Robespierre, and that, from this moment up until Thermidor, I was his declared rival! Robespierre had established himself at the Jacobins, and I in the Committees, from where I expelled him; you'll see! I was a Jacobin myself, but there were two kinds. As for us, we were not popular; we talked about equality, but deep down we were aristocrats! Yes, more aristocratic than anyone perhaps! The Jacobins of the opposite party, such as Hullin, paved the way; they would shout in the crowd on the floor; we only saw them in the stands. It was Robespierre’s henchmen who flattered this populace; Robespierre was its leader, its soul, attempting to reign through them and crush the Convention! But we were his antagonists there, me at the head! He feared me. […] [The fact that I had humiliated his pride] was enough to be certain that he would be my mortal enemy, his hateful and envious character would never forgive me for it, no more than Lacuée who, if it wasn’t for Carnot, he would have had guillotined! […] I understood that you couldn’t go and fight such a man in his club; that I there would be dominated, crushed, and that to resist it, it was necessary to choose another terrain, that is to say the Convention itself and its Committees. It was therefore there that, on my return from Lyon, I began with a report on what needed to be done to stop the complete disorganization of this province, of which I accused Robespierre. People were surprised and terrified by my audacity, Carnot among others, who in his emotion embraced me, praising my courage, but warning me that it would cost me my head! This did not stop me, I persisted; and, addressing all the enemies of the Dictator, either separately or in meetings that I convened as head of public education, I reassured them, encouraged them, and got the Committee to call Robespierre before it to defend itself. It was putting him in a false position, he did not accept it; he refused to present himself and confined himself to the Jacobins, where I proposed to have him attacked, seized as a rebel and thrown into the river! We were preparing the means when the 9th of Thermidor arrived, the day when Tallien, single-handedly, unexpectedly, without having warned us, without knowing our project, warning us, denounced Robespierre as the tyrant of his colleagues! He cited me in support of this questioning, to which Robespierre replied that this was a duel between him and me! You know the rest. But what we don't know is that, under the Directory, it was again me who destroyed the tail of this party, after having thus fought its head! De 1800 à 1812. Un aide de camp de Napoléon. Mémoires du général compte de Ségar (1894), page 437-438

The primary object of [Robespierre’s] ambition seemed to be to strike, in the first place, what remained or what might spring up again of those he looked upon as his personal enemies, of whom in his hatred he never lost sight. At the head of those he had marked for death stood Fouché, and as, in view of the point his personal quarrel with Robespierre had reached, he could not but succumb within a very short time, it had been concluded therefrom that he was to be one of those who would deal the first blows at Robespierre. 

But the arguments brought into play to convince Fouché of his danger were not sufficient to inspire him with courage. He had certainly been at all times an ultra-Revolutionist, and had shown what he was made of in his support of the system of terror; but he had not exactly hit the idea of Robespierre, or rather he had become his rival, and had given him offence by going even further than he did. Fouché's position was therefore not one to afford him opposite his enemy a frank and clearly defined character enabling him to attack him openly. Robespierre had told Fouché that his face was the expression of crime. Fouché, far from replying, took it as a matter of course; expelled from the Jacobins, he had not been able to return to the fold; he no longer dared show himself even in the Convention, but busied himself actively and with a will with intrigues and machinations of the lowest kind. I sent him hither and thither to inform our friends of what we knew of the intentions of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon. His personal dread of the triumvirs served but to increase in his eyes the idea of their hostile plans. Everything that he already dreaded most sincerely was artfully exaggerated by him when seeking to stimulate those whom he sought to induce to make up their minds to action. Rising at early morning, he would run round till night calling on deputies of all shades of opinion, saying to each and everyone, "You perish tomorrow if he does not.” To those who mourned Danton, and who were threatened with the resentment of his executioners, Fouché said: ”We may, if we see fit, be avenged tomorrow, and tomorrow only will we be safe.”

 In order to instil fresh courage into minds so stricken with fright more than one speech was required to place the question before each and every one in such a way that he should see his own interests in it. Hence it cannot be denied that Fouché, gathering together by his clever intriguing all sentiments against Robespierre, was a genuine resource in the midst of the elements extant ready to make a decisive move against the oppressors of the Convention. […] Matters were growing worse apace; no longer was there any possibility of a reconciliation, even under the mask of mutual deceit. Not only had hostilities been declared, but a war to the knife proclaimed. In spite of all Fouché's prudence, a letter written in his own hand had been intercepted, containing particularly the following line addressed to a colleague in the Convention: ”Ere a fortnight has rolled over us either Maximilien or we shall have ceased to exist." Hence the quarrel could end only by the destruction of one side or the other; nothing was left but to conquer or die. 

Even at a time when he was brought face to face with the necessity of defending himself, it was not in Fouché to do so aboveboard. Indirect means, those of ceaseless and underground intrigue, in which he had served his apprenticeship at the Oratory, he was familiar with; and just as everything comes handy in a household, so in a conspiracy, which is itself but an intrigue more serious than others, skill and manoeuvring constitute the necessary elements; and it will be seen that Fouché was to be, if not by his courage, at least by his doings, a useful cooperator in what was about to take place. He has, in later days, boasted that he dealt mortal blows to Robespierre; the fact is that in order to flee from his wrath and, if he could have done so; from his relentless memory, Fouché no longer appeared at the National Convention nor slept at home; it was at night alone that, under various disguises, he would go the rounds of such of his colleagues as were busily engaged in preparing means of defence against Robespierre, and bring and carry from one to the other every particular as to what was taking place, and go on the errands it was requisite should be dextrously done in order to cement the alliances we were forming pending the moment, impossible to positively determine, when the decisive blow was to be struck.  Memoirs of Barras, member of the Directorate (1895) page 207-214

Legendre: […] I did not see Fouché during his missions, but I saw him at the Jacobins; he surrounded himself with all the men who, before the 9th of Thermidor, were preparing for this great day. There he openly attacked Robespierre who, wanting to manage him or give himself the means to destroy him, had him named president of the Jacobins. Fouché seized this post to attack Robespierre more openly, and in his responses he designated this tyrant whom it was necessary to strike. I declare that I see Fouché as one of the elements of the day of 9 Thermidor. Tallien: On Germinal 12, at the time when I believed I saw in Fouché a man linked to the conspirators, I had the courage to denounce him. Since that time, I have had no relationship with him, but it is my duty to defend him by attesting to the facts that are within my knowledge. Fouché was proscribed by Robespierre, because he had opposed the measures taken by Collot in Lyon. Fouché courageously unmasked Robespierre, and declared that, even if his head fell, he would make this dictator known to the people. Every day Fouché came to report to us what was happening at the Committee of Public Safety, and the day before the 9th of Thermidor he told us: “The division is complete, tomorrow we must strike.” The next day, the tyrant was no more. Fouché, at the same time, wrote to his sister: “In a short time the tyrant shall be punished. Robespierre only have a few days left to reign.” This letter was intercepted by Bô, who sent it to Robespierre. These are the facts I had to make known. Legendre and Tallien at the Convention, August 9 1794

Madame Collot (d’Herbois)   Mademoiselle Robespierre   (their titles are common as well as their distress) Per month: 200 pounds Per year: 2400 pounds for special help. Collective decree granting Charlotte a pension from Minister of Police Fouché dated February 8 1805, cited in Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961) by Gabriel Pioro and Pierre Labracherie.

[monimarat]

The letter section of Le Gaulois is where the dispute between Ernest Hamel and Victorien Sardou about the Duplay house really took off in 1895. A year earlier though, on the hundredth anniversary of Thermidor, Le Gaulois published a piece in which Hamel and Sardou are both quoted.

The article is a companion piece to the coverage of the trial of Sante Geronimo Caserio, the anarchist who assassinated Sadi Carnot, president of France and grandson of Lazare:

“The ninth of Thermidor dealt the fatal blow to the revolutionary regime of which Robespierre had been the most brilliant personification. Will the trial, where the assassin of Carnot's grandson will be judged in the coming days, inaugurate the era of a Thermidorian reaction in the contemporary anarchist movement?”

The piece begins with a summary of the 1794 events which is… not very nuanced: “Robespierre is at the height of his power, which is limitless, because he reigns by terror.” etc., and then moves on to an excerpt of Sardou’s play Thermidor, in which Sardou seems to portray Robespierre as the personification of the terror.

The article then takes a (brief) moment to introduce a differing perspective. Ernest Hamel, for the defense, responds to Sardou’s portrayal, pointing out that Sardou holds Robespierre responsible for everything while arbitrarily exonerating others (including Carnot) and that he ignores Robespierre’s absence during the worst days of the terror. Sardou responds back that actually, yes, everything is Robespierre’s fault.

The whole exchange highlights the way in which the coming debate about the Duplay house was about the house, but also about Sardou and Hamel’s opposing views of Robespierre. Hamel maintained that the house had been completely demolished and Sardou delighted in mocking him for having, in his opinion, missed a whole house that was standing right there. They were both guarding their own reputation, and Sardou was certainly trying to discredit Hamel as a historian.

But the tragedy was in Hamel’s response. Although in the end he may have been correct about the fate of the house, Hamel chose to defend himself by falsifying floor plans and attributing the clearly inaccurate drawings to Élisabeth Le Bas herself. I still can’t get over that.

[frankensteinshimbo]

Nostalgia

A vampire tries being accountable for his historical exploits to the Childe he made during the 1860s. The recount teaches Frederick that even though he's also historical, he has never had any particular attachment to or any nostalgia for his own life.

The worst couple returns, but I have no particular warnings to throw on this.

"You used to talk at length about the French Revolutionaries during my adolescence. Do you remember?"

Stéphane glanced past the rim of his blocky sunglasses at Frederick. He had just floated back in, bringing the dry smell of California air with him. Unlike the small round sunglasses of the 1800s aristocracy, these glasses covered the Frenchman's eyes so thoroughly Frederick couldn't discern the nuance of Stéphane's expressions, but the slightest tweak of his lips suggested humor.

The blond threw himself into an armchair at an angle that half-spilled him out of it. He was still dressed from his outing in the deliciously low clothing of this young century. The button down shirt was more artistic than anything Frederick would've seen in Atlanta, (a Queen's Blue canvas strewn with pale lemons), but it was the brown denim cut off at Stéphane's thighs that had a hard time not leading his eyes down the limber muscles of the other man's legs.

Luckily for Frederick's modesty, Stéphane had been distracted by Frederick's question and was contemplating a wall, mouth in hand.

"Huh. Yeah, I do," he replied. "Robespierre, Billaud Varenne..."

"Collot d'Herbois," Frederick reminded him tidily.

"Collot d'Herbois! That is an old name!"

Stéphane pushed the sunglasses up into his hair.

"Couthon. So many men that have been added to the archives of history."

Frederick's pursed his lips primly at the admission. It hollowed his cheeks, casting his normally soft face in severe light. He slid forward on his seat to perch at the lip. From there, it was easy to catch Stéphane's flitting blue eyes and bore his dark ones into that chink.

"How old are you, Stéphane?"

Quick as a wolf, Stéphane quirked his lips at the rabbit's inquiry.

"How old are you, Junior?"

Some integral machine inside of Frederick stopped running, leaving only dead air inside of his mind.

Stéphane's grin widened as he took in the discord he'd sown.

"Or is your resurrected body exempt from a test mine has to be held to? Does Persephone care for Hades age? Does any other immortal? Age is a way of accounting for finite time. What's the point when your days are endless?"

"It matters because my hourglass had a measured amount of sand when I met you."

Stéphane gave Frederick an airy shrug.

"I guess it did," Stéphane sighed as he shook his waterfall of hair over his shoulders. "You're entitled to that curiosity as a fledgling in this life, but I'd like you to start looking past mortal constructs."

He flicked a last wisp of blond silk from his face.

"You know? Adjust."

This sounded so rational that Frederick resented it with the kind of frustration that knew no reason. The feeling burned through the bottom of his stomach so suddenly, that it was distinct from the days - weeks perhaps - of calm apathy. Even to his own dissatisfaction responding to it was distasteful, but he found himself insisting petulantly:

"But you were alive during the Revolution?"

Stéphane had good humor enough to laugh at the Childe.

"For a couple of them yes. I fought the French one. Is that clear enough?"

He spoke with the unrelenting patience Frederick had remembered. It stood in such stark contrast to the senseless angry death he'd been treated to at Stéphane's hands that ache introduced itself to the burn, leaving distress the concoction both adverse memories created.

"And then after that?"

Frederick forced himself to be understanding. The French Revolution was still fresh on the tongue during the Antebellum. An event of political upheaval that his mother had thrown around as a type of politics that was on the make. She had still dressed like "the Republican ladies in Paris," long into the depths of Southern Rebellion.

"I Goldrushed; you know that."

Frederick's brow wrinkled. He did remember catching edges of the story, hiding at the frays of smoking room conversations he hadn't been invited to to listen to the French dandy's strange wonderful adventures.

"In eighteen-fifty-nine," he said more than asked.

"Euh--"

Stéphane's eyes fluttered.

"Forty-nine, actually," he corrected. "But-- ah! That's right!" he exclaimed softly. "Most people knew me as twenty-five then, so I edited some of the details. I came to California a year after a friend did. An Englishman, actually. He was kindred to you and me."

Stéphane gestured to the gap between him and Frederick. Us, the small motion conveyed with devastating clarity. Us.

"He had ideas regarding the Mexican-American conflicts that cropped up with the settlers. He was something of a career revolutionary, and California was his next soapbox after the Republic had been settled."

Stéphane tilted his head to gauge how well Frederick was stomaching that particular truth.

Frederick was struggling. He had never been able to identify clear emotions since he'd been a teenager and realized that most people weren't being Romantic when they talked about being swayed by their passions. But he did have sensations that manipulated his nerves and made him prone to blunt outbursts. Oral-aggressive and anal-retentive the doctors had told his mother. That building concoction inside of his low stomach had foamed up into his throat, but there he sat, impressively stoic.

"And then?"

Stéphane adopted a crooked smile.

"I spent a couple years as a volunteer in the Mexican-American war and watching the Presidio grow into San Francisco. The railroads completed, connecting the desert washes to the plains and to lamppost cities. New York. Boston. New Orleans. People all came West, not for fortune or fight but to live life. And I thought what the fuck am I doing here?"

"And then?"

"And then the Civil War," Stéphane laughed and then scooted forward himself.

His eyes locked with Frederick's, knees almost touching.

"And then World War One after that. I became a student of Futurism and longed to go back to Paris, but I'd had you by then, so I stayed by your graveside, hoping for a kinder world to bring you back into. Then the Second World War, then the Cold War. Another revolution of technology, the Information Age. But Life isn't a series of 'and thens.' They're moments I cherish."

Stéphane extended his hand to the old Baptist preacher, offering a new millennium perched on Frederick's knee.

"And the present. Always the present. Today, then tomorrows I want you to see with me after that."

Frederick stared down at the open palm in silence.

"I was your disciple once," he began in a cold dead voice. "I entreated all of your beliefs, adopted them as my own, but then I found grievous flaw with them. I left you."

"And what did you find in your holy Sabbatical, Father?"

Frederick's lips swinged again.

"I'm not a Catholic," he said with purposeful pedantry through a tight frown.

But it was a (what he considered anyway) fundamental truth. Unlike most of the clergy, Frederick had considered his faith worldly over ascendant. He didn't often speak in scripture and, like most Protestant reformers, resented piety for piety's sake. His sermons were plain; his faith was measured by observable proofs when God remained, Himself, unobservable.

"In truth, it wasn' the world of dreams we used to talk about, but it helped me learn my own arrogance, an' I taught myself the humility of what it meant to be colored an' free, while my parishioners were enslaved. I have no special memories of that time; it was also a day after another, just prayin', but I was a real every day comfort for those folks in an unsure time."

Stéphane rolled his eyes, but he didn't withdraw.

"It always surprises me how many people are content to bury themselves in obscurity, but I couldn't let one of them be you, Junior. I don't believe for a second that religion was your calling; I think it was an excuse to bow out of the world."

His hand rolled over to grab Frederick's cuff and held on. It took every ounce of willpower for Frederick not to pull back

"You were too smart, too full of ideals, too many stars in my empty sky. There was no point in my eternity if you weren't here for it."

For the first time, the glowing vision in front of him sounded like he was pleading for something. He sunk from the armchair to kneel in front of Frederick. Frederick's eyes widened. Stéphane's grip on Frederick's arm, even through the thick wool of the coat, started to hurt.

"I'm sorry that the night of your Embrace was violent, but I accepted that you left once--"

Frederick could see himself reflected in Stéphane's light eyes, startled and just a little bit beautiful in his own surprise. More beautiful than he had ever been in many mirrors when he'd been alive.

"--I couldn't let you fade into obscurity again, knowing you'd go the way of every bright light I'd once called friend."

The pressure in his arm, the ardent desperation in Stéphane's eyes, the white European beauty he'd always envied laid at his feet. The world weighing his shoulders down lifted as he gazed at this perfect tragedy concocted for his ego. And... he couldn't fight it.

He wasn't exactly sure when his ex had gotten back into his arms, whose initiation it was, but his lips were joined all the same. He stilled, feeling it happen through different points of contact on his body, through his clothes, the shift of Stéphane's mouth on his own.

It seemed like a gothic heroine's decision to push away or to kiss back with resolve, but when that penultimate moment came, all he could think of was the place he'd grown up, his church, and the War that had never quite ended in his mind, the hidden burden of being an abolitionist in the South, and how helpless all of that conflict had made a body feel.

God, as ever, remained silent and unobservable.

[lanterne]

more things

1. They tell us about how the republic starts winning wars and crushing internal conflict, so the terror worked, but that wasnt good enough for robespierre, who wanted to create a ~virtuous republic~. The assumption you get is that ~everything was fine~ by january 94.

2. They quote the “virtue without which terror is disastrous, terror without which virtue is powerless” speech completely out of context. Without the context of the hebertists vs dantonist, and omiting the full thing (If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy), it makes him sound completely deranged.

3. the timeline is a complete mess.

4. Danton. We need to talk about Danton. He’s introduced as “Robespierre but fun :))))” early on, then set aside, then made to say shit he didnt say, then set aside again, and then he opposes the terror and dies for disagreeing with Robespierre. Not a single word about the hebertists or the corruption scandal, or the foreing plot. Turned him into a side character lmao

5. Of course Robespierre sends ThouSanDs of dantonist to the guillotine. And then he’s sad about it :(