"Among the leaders of the French Revolution none has a more mythical status than Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. His brief political career encompassed the most radical moment of the 18th century: the Jacobin Republic of the Year Two (1793-4). The Jacobins tried to forge a better world, one in which democracy, liberty and equality would become a reality, but to achieve it they used state-sponsored coercion and violence, in what became known as the Terror. The experiment ended when Saint-Just, along with Robespierre, succumbed to the guillotine in the bloodbath of Thermidor (July 1794). For many people, Saint-Just, even more than Robespierre, embodies the revolution itself: young, full of feverish energy, courage and idealism, but, like the revolutionary Terror, capable of sacrificing human lives, including his own, to make the ideal a reality. When Victor Hugo in his 1862 novel, Les Misérables, described the young student Enjolras, who leads the climatic fight on the barricade, as having ‘too much of Saint-Just' about him, his readers knew what that meant. A few years earlier, Hugo's contemporary and fellow countryman, the great republican historian Jules Michelet, described Saint-Just as ‘the archangel of death', a phrase that encapsulated the legend of the unnaturally beautiful and cold-bloodedly terrible Saint-Just.
People take extreme views about Saint-Just. He is still a controversial figure, even among Anglo-American historians who are usually more dispassionate about the French Revolution than the French themselves. One biographer, the American Eugene Curtis, saw in Saint-Just a French incarnation of the romantic and radical poet Shelley. The English historian Norman Hampson took a more jaundiced view and, perhaps with Michelet's metaphor of the fallen angel in mind, likened Saint-Just to Lucifer.
Can we get past this controversy to find out how far the myth had a basis in reality? One way is to look at his early life, before the world of revolutionary politics claimed him. He was born on August 25th, 1767 in Decize, in Burgundy, the son of a retired cavalry officer and a notary's daughter. When Saint-Just was nine his family moved to Blérancourt, a small town in his father's native Picardy. The following year his father died, leaving the mother to bring up her children alone. As a teenager, Saint-Just fell in love with a local girl, Thérèse Gellé. They hoped to marry but her father wanted a wealthier son-in-law. While Saint-Just was away, she was married off in a wedding attended by all the worthies of Blérancourt. When Saint-Just discovered this he was furious, not least with his mother, who had kept the news from him. Several weeks later, in September 1786, he absconded from his home, taking with him some of the family's silver, which he sold in a Paris café. At his mother's insistence the adolescent was tracked down, interrogated by the police and imprisoned in a house of detention, where he spent six miserable months to reflect upon his misdeeds. He must have felt deeply humiliated by this experience: he never spoke about it and few people ever knew. It may have influenced him in other ways, too, for in later writings he attacked the oppression of women and children in patriarchal families and defended women's freedom to choose whom they loved…"
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Armand
receives a gift from his wife…
