Camille Desmoulins and his Wife. Passages from the history of the Dantonists ... Translated ... by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. With a portrait

Preface

. Scribitur ad narrandum ver it at em. The following history of the most dramatic and touching episodes of the French Revolution has cost the author many years of labour, which he regards as the best employed period of his life. Just as he had terminated his researches into the life and character of the men on whom he proposed to form a judgment, the late war between France and Prussia broke out, and the terrible days which led France for a moment to the brink of destruction ensued. Not until after those dark days of cruel trial had come to an end did the historian resume his interrupted task, bringing to its fulfilment greater calmness of mind and increased certitude of experience ; for, by the light of events of which he has been the sorrowful eyewitness, he has contemplated the facts of an eventful past not yet a century old.

Such periods of national trouble as that through which we have just passed have one element of consolation amid their bitterness ; they force the least reflec tive minds into attention and thought. They are the hours of ' examination of conscience ' for peoples. The Preface. VIII nations, and every thinking being among them, ask themselves whence has ruin come, and where has the sin been ? Only by comparing the tempests of the past with those of the present can we study them scientifically, and define their causes and their results. No study is more useful at the present day than that of the French Revolution, undertaken in a free spirit, untrammelled by any sectarian tradition, or traditional idolatry, animated solely by the ardent love of liberty, and of justice. Either the time has now come, or it will never come, to press the experiences of yesterday into the service of the realisations of to-morrow ; to exhibit in their true light, with all their greatness, and all their weakness, the men who, in the space of three years, from 1792 to 1795, accomplished a task which eight centuries of monarchy had failed to achieve ; who restored its natural boundaries to our country, but who also set a Cæsar over the aggran dized land.

The right moment has come at which to show the world how Republics perish, in order that it may learn how Republics may be founded. The author has attempted such a task. He knows that a writer who ventures to tell the truth, without making phrases, in troublous times like the present, when parties are fighting almost at haphazard, like sharpshooters at night, exposes himself to no small obloquy. He knows that a work of historical criticism, such as the present narrative, is likely to be equally displeasing to friends and adversaries. The knowledge does not disturb him. In the 'interior judge' of whom Fenelon speaks, the writer has a sovereign adjudicator ■his conscience — placed above all other judges ; and Preface. IX the law which he holds dominant over all laws is that of respect for the truth as he believes it to be. ' I bend no more before the red heel than before the red cap,' said the Russian patriot, Alexander Herzen, one of the manliest and most independent men of this century.

Like him, the author despises courtiership of every kind, to whatever rank or power it may address itself. This history may then be read with confidence. In it will be found nothing insincere, nothing which is not borne out by facts, based upon a document, or proved by some written evidence, whether already known, or published for the first time in this volume. Our era is that of exactness and of patience in the matter of historic research. It does not boast the lofty flights of genius, but it has at least the virtue of respect for truth ; which is, perhaps, the most praiseworthy of virtues, for, to our mind, it leads to all the others. It was no easy task for the author to make up his mind to close this work, which was the joy and the hope of his youth. What bright and happy dreams he had dreamed over it !

With what intense pleasure he had turned over the faded yellow papers of the Archives ! With what emotion he had opened the records of the revolutionary tribunals ! With what pain he had watched the falling, one by one, of so many noble and intellectual heads ! How he had rejoiced to find in those faded pages the memory and the echo of many glorious days ! When the following chapters shall be read, a gloomy contrast must necessarily be drawn between that past and the present, or rather, between the past of eighty years ago and the past of yesterday. How great France then was, soaring above the world, X Preface. and, better still, illuminating it with her lustre, over awing it, astonishing it rather by her ideas than by her arms ; offering the unique spectacle of a single nation repelling the invasion of a world, and distributing the standards captured from the enemy in its external strife, to serve as bandages for the wounded in its civil wars.

That was a proud and lofty spectacle, even for the conquered — aye, for the conquered above all ! Perhaps it will make us reflect more seriously on our brief humili ation. If France is to be saved, and reconstituted, for which I hope with all the strength of my being, it will be by the picture of her past greatness, of the devotion, the dissensions, the martyrdoms, the sufferings, and the glories of other days. In them there is twofold profit, twofold teaching. We learn at once to avoid the sanguinary excesses into which our fathers fell, and to imitate the self-denying examples by which they effaced their severe measures, their faults, and their errors. May the perusal of these pages strengthen minds who feel what republican virtue ought to be, in devotion to liberty, respect for law, love of justice, obedience to duty, and love of country — that sublime love for France which sustains, engenders, and quickens all other virtues.

This historical essay has no other aim. The author's task will seem light to him if he shall have succeeded in making his readers love, not only the men whose tragical fate he narrates, but those great things which rise above the men — Liberty and Country. JULES CLARETIE. CONTENTS. PACE Preface vii

Chapter I

i. The man and his natal soil— A journey to Guise— The old city and the new — The house in which Camille Desmoulins was born — His family. 2. Birth and education of Camille — The college of Louis-le-Grand — The Abbe Berardier — Camille begins to practise at the Bar. 3. France in 1789— The cahiers of the States-General — An Electoral Assembly at Guise — Canaille's father — The Complaint of the parish of Chaillevois — The ' Red Book.' 4. Broadsheets and pamphlets — The ' Philosophic au Peuple frangais ' of Camille Desmoulins (1788) — The ' Odes to the States- General' — Camille's youth— Chateaubriand — The Palais-Royal — Momoro and ' La France fibre ' — The 1 3th of July— The green cockade — The taking of the Bastille 1

Chapter II

1. An analysis of ' La France libre' — Camille and the Republic — The ' Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens.' 2. Letters from Camille to his father — His connection with Mirabeau — The ' Revolutions de France et de Brabant' — Fr_ron — A republican pamphlet and a royalist pamphlet — The ' Actes des Apotres ' — A fight with pens — Camille and the fete of the Federation in 1790 — Attacks upon Mirabeau — Mirabeau's death. 3. Polemics and law-suits — Mirabeau-Tonneau, Talon, Malouet — The duellists — Desessarts the actor, and Sanson the executioner — Camille's attitude Contents. XII

Chapter III. Page

I. Camille's romance — Lucile Desmoulins — Portrait of Mademoiselle Duplessis — Portrait of Camille — A young girl's journal — Reveries — Lucile and Madame Roland — The red copy-book— Romances of the eighteenth century — Sylvain Mar.chal— Camille's marriage — Disputes with the cure" — The contract. 2. Happy days — Calumnies of the Royalist newspapers — The Abb. Terray— Peltier and R_tif de la Br .tonne— Bourg-la-Reine. 3. The Club of the Cordeliers— Camille's correspondence with his father— Loustallot — The flight of Louis XVI.— Varennes— The petition of the Champ de Mars — Desmoulins is proscribed— He reappears at the tribune of the Jacobins — An advertisement by Camille — Rupture with Brissot— Danton— Birth of Horace Desmoulins. 4. The court and the nation— Roland's ministry — The hesitation of the King — The 20th June — Unpublished fragment by Camille — A letter to Lucile — Speech at the Jacobins upon the situation . of the capital — The 10th of August. 5. Camille on August 10— Lucile's journal — Camille as general secretary of the Ministry of Justice — The advice of Camille's father 118

Chapter IV

1. Election to the National Convention — Camille a deputy — His hopes — The Convention — Montagnards and Girondins — The Dantonists — Danton. 2. H.rault de S.chelles — His life, his character, and his works. 3. Pierre Philippeaux, General Westermann, and Fabre d'Eglantine 191

Chapter V

1. Proclamation of the Republic (September 21st, 1792) — The death of the King — Camille Desmoulins' vote — Lucile and Marie- Antoinette — Struggle with the Gironde — Marat — Danton and Camille— Clemency — Disheartenment — Arthur Dillon — Camille undertakes his defence — The' Histoiredes Brissotins' — October 31 — Macbeth. 2. 'Le Vieux Cordelier' — Saint-Just and Billaud- Varennes — Struggle with the H.bertists — Anacharsis Clootzand Anaxagoras Chaumette — Camille and Tacitus — The infuriates — Liberty — Camille denounced to the Jacobins — Pere Duchesne — The Committee of Clemency. Contents. XIII PAGE 3. The last numbers of the ' Vieux Cordelier ' — Fragments by Camille not printed in 1794 — Camille and Lucile — Lucile Desmoulins' despair — Letter to Fr.ron — Brune — Cras moriemur .' — Robespierre and Camille — The song of the swan. 4.

Punishment of the H.bertists — The arrest of the Dantonists is resolved upon — Death of Camille's mother — The Dantonists in the prison of the Luxembourg — Camille's letters to Lucile — Saint-Just's report — The 'instruction' — The trial— Letter of M. Desmoulins the elder to Fouquier-Tinville — Horror of the Tribunal — Testimony of Fabricius — The outlawry of the accused . 238

Chapter VI

1. Last moments of the Dantonists — The Tumbril — The scaffold — Death of Camille and of Danton. 2. Prison conspiracies — Lucile accused — Arthur Dillon — Desmoulins' widow and Hubert's widow — Lucile's death. 3. After the battle — Madame Duplessis — The young Horace — Camille's son and Philippeaux's son — Unpublished letters — Death of Horace Desmoulins — Relics of Camille . . . 342 Appendix 381 Additions to Appendix 471 ILL USTRA TIONS. Portrait ............ Frontispiece Fac-simile of an Autograph Letter of Camille Desmoulins to his Father to face page -x CAMILLE DESMOULINS AND HIS WIFE.

Chapter I. Camille Desmoulins And The Dantonists

I. The man and his natal soil — A journey to Guise — The old city and the new — The house in which Camille Desmoulins was born — His family. 2. Birth and education of Camille — The college of Louis-le-Grand — The Abbe Berardier — Camille begins to practise at the Bar. 3. France in 1789 — The cahiers of the States-General — An Electoral Assembly at Guise — Camille's father — The Complaint of the parish of Chaillevois — The ' Red Book.' 4. Broadsheets and pamphlets — The 'Philosophic au Peuple frangais ' of Camille Desmoulins (1788) — The 'Odes to the States-General' — Camille's youth — Chateaubriand — The Palais-Royal — Momoro and la France libre — The 13th of July — The green cockade — The taking of the Bastille. A man always retains a little of the natal air which he has breathed in childhood and in youth.

In many instances the temperament and the life of an individual may be explained by the soil on which he was born. Why should we not ask a village, a street, a paternal dwelling, whether they have not preserved some secret remembrance of the celebrated person whose first utterances they have heard, whose first dreams they have silently witnessed ? Inanimate things, it seems to me, may have their regrets, and we may find traces in them of the beings whose birth, development, and death they have beheld. Besides, the eager need of knowing everything which belongs to our time requires that the historian shall study the scenery and decorations of his drama before he begins to unfold its action. It was on an April morning, while the cannon of the civil war was roaring around Paris, that I resolved to go to Guise and ask the little town for recollections of Camille Desmoulins, the 'gamin of genius,' whom Paris attracted, seduced, and kept for ever.

It was not without emotion that I undertook this journey. It seems to me that the shades of the famous dead return to the places where the memory of them dwells. I was eager to see and to interrogate Guise, that quiet city of the Vermandois, which Camille in voked, in the wildest hour of the revolutionary tempest, as an asylum too soon abandoned, a humble paradise for ever lost. Had the town faithfully preserved the memory of one of the most famous of her sons ? Was this district of Picardy, formerly so far advanced in literary culture, grateful to Camille Desmoulins for the literary renown which he had reflected upon it ? The spirit of the soil has changed within the last fifty years ; the sharp, satirical, mocking, gossipping spirit, that of the litterateur, and of the story-teller after the fashion of the fabliaux, has been gradually silenced by the opposite spirit of speculation and industry, which has invaded the whole country.

At Vervins and at Guise there are to be found at present only a few speci mens of those old provincial scholars, deeply learned, laborious savans, who toiled in semi-obscurity at some patient task, far from the central light indeed, The Man and his Natal Soil. 3 but perhaps near to the truth. In all probability I was destined to disappointment, and should not find even the phantom of Camille Desmoulins at Guise. The way from Saint Ouentin to the hard-working little town of Guise lies through a rich, productive, un picturesque country, where cornfields stretch away to the horizon on either side of the road. Guise does not announce itself in any way to the traveller, who hardly sees the high tower of the chateau as he approaches ; but, on descending a sloping road, which passes through a kind of faubourg composed of houses with thatched roofs, is surprised to find himself in a city of the past — of strange, calm, sleepy aspect.

The fortified chateau stands, firm and imposing, upon the summit of a steep ascent, and the houses, almost all dating from the seven teenth century, seem to nestle beneath it for shelter. There are two distinct towns in this little city of Guise : the old and the new ; but the old still maintains its sway. The old town of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, built upon the hill hard by the chateau, that town which we see in the etching by Johannis Peeters Delin (1572) with its ancient donjon and its ramparts, it is true, no longer exists. The whole of Guise seems contemporary with Desmoulins, with the early years of the Revolution. But its quasi-antiquity was sufficient for me. I was seeking only for traces of the manners and the memories of the eighteenth century. The tall roofs are covered with slates ; the streets look as they looked in 1750.

The dwellings of the bourgeois and the small tradesmen bear the dates of their construction, inserted into the building in figures made of iron rods. As one walks along the narrow but regular streets, one's fancy reconstructs the life of the past ; and sees, in the traders of to-day, the B merchants and shopkeepers of former times, the mercers and the drapers. Not for many a year has the slated belfry of the little Town Hall resounded with the peal of its tenant, but, though hushed, the tongue is still there which celebrated all the joys and announced all the mournings of the community. How small and humble this little Town Hall looks, standing at the foot of the chateau, frowned on by the citadel and menaced by its guns. It exists, it might be said, only under favour of this perpetual threat, and the chateau could destroy it at a single blow.

But the huge pile of stone represents nothing more than brute force, mere strength. The little building contains the papers of the city, the certificates of births and marriages, registers, deeds — this old house represents the law. The lofty tower, leprous and unsightly with its yellow stains of time, rears itself up, formidable, indeed, but useless, like a giant disarmed by old age. This colossal construction, for all the thickness of its mighty walls, could not have arrested the German invasion in 1870 for two hours. Its sonorous arches, its great gates with arms blazoned in sculpture on the rock above them, its gloomy galleries, are of no avail against modern warfare waged with guns of steel. When I passed by, the Gardes Mobiles were at their drill in the shade, while the wind blew merrily over the height, whence I could see distant fields, the rivers Aisne and Somme, groves of trees, villages half hidden in verdure, or by the undulations of the ground.

On the horizon was Wiege, where sleep the humble ancestors of Camille, and at the foot of the citadel was Guise, with its lofty roofs, its promenades, its trees, the buildings of the Famislistere, wearing the gay and prosperous aspect A fourney to Guise. 5 of a small industrious town. I came and went, I looked about, I sought out every association, and I pictured to myself Camille Desmoulins, going to and from the Picard town, following the course of the little river, book in hand, reading, dreaming, exhaling his youthful enthusiasm. Methought I came upon him once more at the corners of the narrow streets, or in one of those quiet old houses, full of books and the talk of old times, or on the road to the chateau, climbing the steep ascent to the citadel, stopping on his way to listen, smilingly, to the music chanted in the church ; reciting verses from Voltaire before the chapel, and quoting Tacitus in front of the fortress.

The house in which Camille Desmoulins was born stands in the High Street of the town, called in the documents of the time ' the street of the Grand Pont, in front of the Place d'Armes.'1 It is a small, clean looking, cheerful house with a slate roof, and walls of dazzling whiteness, manifestly the house of a bourgeois family, honest, estimable people, accustomed to daily labour, to the patient and uncomplaining endurance of the cares and needs of life, and fain to accept with gratitude the rest which succeeded to each day's work well done. Not rich, of a surety, but content with 1 The following particulars have been obtained from the present proprietor of the house : — Last deed of sale (1852). A house at Guise, in the Grande Rue, opposite the Place d'Armes, roofed with slate, with garrets and cellar, stable, coach-house, yard, and garden ; the building facing the Grande Rue, and extending backwards to the Place Lesur.

Preceding proprietors : — 1. Jean-Joseph-Benoni Ducrot, formerly advocate of the Cour Royale at Paris, and Henriette-Florence Alix, his wife. 2. Pierre-Alexis Hennequierre, deceased, landowner at Guise, and Genevieve-Laurence-Virginie Teffin, his widow. 3. M. Philippe-Francois Hennequierre et Madame Marie-Louisa- Victorie Merlin, his wife. 4. Jean-Benoit-Nicolas Desmoulins. their fate, satisfied with the lot that had fallen to them, and prouder of their reputation for honesty than of their narrow fortune. Not theirs, repose with dignity, the otium cum dignitate of the ancients, but a better lot, that of toil with dignity. The whole house tells of habitual work, and it is easy for one's fancy to refurnish those rooms, with their ceilings sup ported by beams of wood, and their plainly carved panels ; to reconstruct the lawyer's study, with its great table laden with papers, its bookshelves filled with learned books, and heavy treatises on law ; and to discern the housewife's favourite corner, the work table and the chair which were Madame Desmoulins'.

The front of the house facing the street has been partly taken down ; it was in that portion that the young pair lived at first after their marriage. The small house in the garden, with the date of the year 1772 cut upon its walls, was no doubt built when the former dwelling had been outgrown by the children born to them and then growing up. In the second building, erected during the childhood of Camille, we find the shadows of many things of the past ; some peaceful and some sad. There are the stairs which resounded to the children's noisy tread ; the kitchen, like one of Chardin's pictures, which was so busy and bustling on days when that important personage Cousin de Viefville des Essarts visited the house, or when the Prince de Conti sojourned beneath the roof of the Lieutenant-general.

The past revives between these white walls, in the flowery little garden, in this corner of the world which seems to have preserved the memory of the former dwellers in it, long after that memory has died away from among the living; a vanished past, a humble and gentle past, calm, peace- The House in which Camille was Bom. 7 ful, simple and severe, like the upright life of the elder Desmoulins, sad and tear-stained like the destiny of an honest man. In one story of this house, which is at present the property of M. Bailly, there lives an old man, who was formerly a dancing-master. He is an amiable old man, very smiling, polite, and odd. Since 1810 he has never quitted his abode, which is filled with old engravings and mineralogical curiosities of his own collecting. I tried to awaken in the memory of this charming little old man an echo of the noise which Desmoulins made here formerly ; but in vain.

M. Fey deau gently shook his head, whitened with the snows of ninety years, a head like one by Holbein for saga city and wrinkles, as he answered to my prompting. ' No,' he said, ' I do not know, I have never heard ; the last time any one spoke of Camille Desmoulins at Guise' — then, correcting himself, — 'spoke of the Citizen Camille Desmoulins, was when our Prefect, M. de la Forge, came here to review the Mobiles. I have no remembrance of anything else.' The inhabitants of Guise are all like this old man. They have for gotten their unfortunate townsman, the generous fool, the mad-cap of genius, who gave his life to the Repub lic ; — they have forgotten, after having misunderstood and perhaps calumniated, him. I had been informed that an interesting portrait of Camille existed in the Town Hall at Guise, and was to be found in the municipal council chamber.

I went thither and asked to see the portrait. Two officials who accompanied me pointed to some portraits of cer tain great personages of former times, clad in cuirasses and wearing long curled wigs. ' It must be that one,' said one of my guides, indicating a portrait of big, fat M. de Beaulieu, who defended Guise in the brave days of old. Evidently this man thought I could not be anxious to see any but a great personage. The portrait of a small attorney, and a poor writer, indeed ! ' It may be here, after all,' said the man, as he opened a sort of dark press in the wall, where the shiny black gowns and caps of judges, lawyers, and officials of the court were hung up in dusty obscurity, and the firewood destined for municipal consumption was also stored. There, in a dark corner, heaped together, were a number of blackened and worn gilt frames, old portraits, and busts of dethroned personages, kings and queens.

These were the detritus of our revolutions ; all that our poor France has by turns welcomed with acclamation and then renounced and repelled ; carried to the Pantheon with blind admiration or flung into the gutter with mad fury ; all the fallen and faded royalties, all the beaten ones lay there to gether, brought into incongruous contact by the ironical community of destiny. A plaster bust of the late Emperor faced a bronze bust of King Louis Philippe. My guide dived among the heap of frames, and brought up in succession a lithograph re presenting the Duke of Orleans; an engraving of the Duke and Duchess de Berry ; Napoleon I., in an im perial mantle spotted with flies, and then a portrait of Cavaignac. The glass frame of the latter was broken. At last, he came upon Camille Desmoulins, a lithographed portrait, after the painting by Francois Bonneville, without any artistic merit.

There it lay, dusty, dirty, forgotten, exiled, as it had lain for years, in the dust and darkness of the past. 'Born at Guise ' was written beneath the figure. Who knew, or cared anything for that, in the little town in Picardy ? Camille's Birth. 9 No one is a prophet in his own country, it seems, not even a martyr. II. Camille Desmoulins was born at Guise on the 2nd of March 1 760, and not, as several .historians have affirmed, in 1762, though he supported their statements himself by his reply to the President of the Revolution ary Tribunal, when, on being asked how old he was, he said : ' I am thirty-three, the age of the sans-culotte Jesus.' In 1794, Camille Desmoulins was thirty four.4 He must have remembered this on the day after his condemnation, for he wrote in his last letter to his wife — ' I die at thirty-four.' Picardy, whose vigorous soil produced the human plant, so to speak, more full of sap and vitality than elsewhere, counts her fighting-men by tens.

Picardy is the country of Condorcet, who was born at Ribemont ; of Babeuf the dreamer of equality, a native of Saint- Ouentin ; of old Calvin, of the Saint-Simons, and the Guises ; and, in more ancient times still, of the preacher of the Crusades, the enlightened and ardent Peter the Hermit. The violent struggle for the emancipation of the commons which the Middle Ages witnessed was most desperate and most decisive in Picardy. One 1 1760. ' On the second day ofthe present month was born, and on the third day of March was baptised, Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist, son of Maistre Jean-Benoist-Nicolas Desmoulins, civil and criminal lieutenant general of the bailiwick of Guise, and of dame Marie-Magdeleine Godart, his wife ; godfather, M. Joseph Godart, maternal uncle, of the parish of Wie'ge ; godmother, dame Magdeleine-Elizabeth Lescarbotte, also of that parish, who have signed, together with us, the present act.' — From the register of the parish of Guise.

Camille was baptised in the church of St. Pierre and St. Paul at Guise (diocese of Laon). It is an odd coincidence that he and his wife were both called Lucie. might believe that Picard blood boils and beats more readily than elsewhere; heads are hot there, and M. Michelet, a Picard himself, calls his country ' choleric Picardy.' With all this, however, Picardy is the country of reason and common sense, fortified by a prudent and sagacious humour, which becomes cunning in the pea sant, and wisdom in the educated man. In the Des moulins family, we find in M. Desmoulins, lieutenant general of the bailiwick of Guise, a striking example of calm reason, as opposed to the quick temper and ardent impulse of the Picard. He was a grave and industrious man, highly esteemed by his fellow townsmen, whose interests he administered with strict honesty ; he was faithful to his public duties, happy in his private life, and he lived free from care and envy in the quiet dwelling, where, when I visited it, I beheld the blue uniforms of the Saxon dragoons.

I picture to myself M. Desmoulins in his modest, well-kept house, like one of those legists, numerous enough in former days in the country parts of France, who lived in obscure retirement, labouring noiselessly at some profound and valuable work. Many a time were men of brilliant renown, the pride of the Parliaments of Paris, obliged to bow before the learning of these unknown scholars, and respectfully to beg their aid. These laborious seekers after knowledge, living in silence face to face with their own works, took no pride in being con sulted by famous men, but, when they had spoken, quietly resumed their interrupted tasks. Thus M. Desmoulins undertook an ' Encyclopædia of Law,' which was never destined to see the light of publicity. His manuscripts have all been dispersed and lost. Camille's Father. 11 M. Desmoulins was not rich.

His wife, Madeleine Godart, of the village of Wiege, brought him a small portion, which partly paid the expenses of the educa tion of the children born during their union, which was one of true affection and tranquil happiness. They had five children : three sons, of whom Camille was the eldest ; (the others, named Dubuquoy and Se mery, became soldiers ;) and two daughters. One of the daughters became a nun ; the other was still living, when in 1838 M. Matton, a relative, published an edition of the works of Camille Desmoulins for her benefit.1 Camille, the eldest son of M. Desipoulins, in spired his parents with the greatest hopes for his future by his intelligence, by the light in his brilliant black eyes, by the precocity of his repartees, and the general liveliness of his mind. The father was so proud of the child that he was prepared to make heavy pecuniary sacrifices in order to develope his fine qualities.