Camille Desmoulins, a biography

Part Four : The South Wind 223 Bibliography 319

INDEX 321

LIST OF PLATES

CAMILLE DESMOULINS, HIS WIFE AND SON Frontispiece ^

From the Painting by David in the Musee de Versailles.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS Facing page 24 ^

From the Painting by Rouillard in the Musee de Versailles.

From the Painting by Boze in the Musee de Chartres.

From a Painting in the Musee Carnavalet,

From an Etching after a Miniature.

Part One The North Wind

" Blown crystal-clear by Freedom's Northern Wind." J. G. Whittier. " Mountain Pictures."

ON an early spring day in the year 1760 a son was born to Maitre Jean-Benoit-Nicholas Desmoulins, civil and criminal lieutenantgeneral of the Bailiwick o£ Guise, and to Dame Marie-Magdeleine Godart, his wife.

No doubt there was great rejoicing in M. Desmoulins' small whitewashed house in the Rue Grand Pont. It is only once in a lifetime that a father can celebrate the birth of his eldest son.

The following day, March 3rd, the little boy was baptised in the Church of St. Pierre and St. Paul, and received the names of Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoist. Years later, in writing to his father, he was to say with Republican enthusiasm : " Did you guess that I should be a Roman, when you christened me Lucius, Sulpicius, Camillus ? "

The little white house with the slated roof stands, or, at least, stood quite recently, in the street '' in front of the Place d'Armes." The low-ceiled panelled rooms remained a few years ago much as they were when Camille played in them as a child.

Nevertheless, the memories of that " gamin of genius " which linger in the town of his birth, after the lapse of a century and a half, are very vague and scanty. In 1871, when the historian, Jules Claretie, visited Guise, he could find few people who had any remembrance of the family of Desmoulins. Their house was easily identified, some of the older residents recalled dim traditions of Camille's tempestuous boyhood, a fly-blown portrait was discovered amongst heterogeneous rubbish in the attics of the town-hall — and that was all.

In his native town, a statue of Camille Desmoulins has since then been erected. Such a reminder is not needed by France, and by the world. There was that touch of genius in the man which makes him as much a bodily presence now in his writings as he was in the Paris of 1789. Whilst we read, we seem to feel him very near ; his reckless laugh, his hurried, hesitant speech are almost audible. . . . He lives still for us, one of the most intimate and virile figures of the great Revolutionary period, yet another of the " boys who will not grow up " of the world's history.

Camille's father, as we have said, was lieutenantgeneral of the Bailiwick of Guise, a sufficiently dignified and honourable post. For the rest, he was a country lawyer and something of a scholar besides, who toiled in his leisure moments at the compilation of a learned and weighty " Encyclopedia of Law " which was destined never to arrive at publication.

We have a very good portrait of M. Desmoulins the elder. It may be found in those letters which passed between him and his son during the years which Camille spent in Paris. It is impossible not to admire and reverence the man who is revealed to us. He is wise and just, essentially well-balanced and eventempered — he has every quality, in short, which Camille lacked.

The father and son represent two distinct types of the Picard character. In M. Desmoulins the elder was exemplified that sound common sense and shrewd reason which should pertain to the province of Calvin, St. Simon and Condorcet.

As to the younger man, he belonged to the breed which an old author, C. M. Saugrain, described in his " Nouveau Voyage de France."

Writing as he did in the year 1720, and speaking of the Picards in general, M. Saugrain's words might well apply to Camille in particular.

" We believe that the name of Picardy," he says, " is derived from the fact that the Picards are easily piqued or offended. ... It is commonly reported that the Picards are hot-headed, and as they are angered with very little -reason, one willingly leaves their province for fear of being involved in quarrels ; for the rest, they are very sincere."

Camille often found his father lacking in ambition, and over-fond of deliberation ; there was even one period when he thought him callous and hard. But these were only temporary misunderstandings. A fundamental love subsisted between the father and son which nothing really affected, a love which only grew stronger until death separated them.

We know very little of Dame Marie-Magdeleine Godart, the mother of Camille. That little is well summed up in the few sentences written by M. Desmoulins to his son on the day of her death, and received by that son when he was himself in the very shadow of the scaffold.

" I have lost the half of myself. Your mother is no more. . . . She is worthy of all our regrets ; she loved you tenderly."

It is an epitaph of which no woman would have cause to be ashamed.

M. Desmoulins had four other children besides Camille, two sons and two daughters.

It is evident that Camille himself, in later years, knew curiously little about these younger brothers of his, Du Bucquoy and Semery.

All, practically, that v/e can learn of them is contained in a letter from M. Desmoulins to his eldest son in 1792. This letter was published by the " Journal de Vervins " in 1884, and it was plainly written in answer to one of Camille's.

" You ask me, my son," says M. Desmoulins, " for the name of your brother, Du Bucquoy, as well as for that of Semery. The former is called Armand Jean Louis Domitille, who was born on May 5th, 1765. For the past seven years he has served in the late Royal Roussillon cavalry regiment, or the iith Regiment of the Army of the Midi, and which I beHeve is either in the interior at Saumur or at Saint-Jean-d'Angely, for I have had no news of him for the last twelve months.

" The latter is named Lazare Nicolas Norbert Fehcite, born on June 6th, 1769, and for the past two years in the loth BattaHon of Chasseurs, late Gevaudan, with the Army of the North, in which he shows much zeal. He tells me in his last letter that he is a forlorn sentinel in a wood, and congratulates you on the birth of a son.

" ' As for me,' he says, ' I also am married. My wife is a musket, and I take greater care of her than of myself.' "

A short time after this letter was written, in 1793, Desmoulins Du Bucquoy was killed in the Vendean war.

The younger brother, the " forlorn sentinel in a wood," was captured at the siege of Maestricht, and from that time his family seem to have lost sight of him and to have believed him to be dead. He was, however, known to be living in 1807.

It is a plain record, this, of the lives of two honest soldiers of the Republic. Camille, in the heat of his own battle at Paris, fighting with his own weapon, was to envy v\^hat he thought to be the cleaner warfare of his brothers, and to wish that he could exchange his pen for a sword.

The two sisters were named Marie Emilie Toussaint and Anne Clotilde Pelagic Marie. The elder, born in 1763, was married twice, first to a M. Morcy and secondly to a M. Lagrange. She was still alive in 1837. The younger, who was born in 1767, became the wife of a M. Lemoine. Beyond these bare facts we know little or nothing of their after lives.

Camille was first sent, whilst quite a little boy, to a religious boarding-school at Cateau-Cambresis. Amongst his schoolfellows there was his first cousin, Marie Joseph Benoit Godart, son of Godart Brisieux, Madame Desmoulin's brother.

It would seem that from his very earHest youth Camille showed unusual precocity and intelligence. His father, although so diffident on his own account, was not by any means lacking in ambition for his son, as he watched the development of the boy's talents. He planned that Camille should become a great lawyer, an advocate to the Parliament of Paris, but unfortunately the money necessary for a thorough education was not forthcoming.

The Desmoulins were a good bourgeois family, not in any way aristocratic, but what might be called " well-connected." M. Desmoulins, moreover, was a comparatively poor man. His wife only brought him a small dowry, and he had to provide for a growing family.

It seemed that Camille's brilliant career would end very prematurely, that the boy must resign himself to become, like his father before him, a quiet, provincial man of the law. But the life of a country lawyer was not for Camille Desmoulins.

A certain aristocratic connection of the family, one M. de Viefville des Essarts, came to the rescue and obtained for the little boy a scholarship at the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

This was exactly the opportunity for which M. Desmoulins had longed, and one day in the month of October Camille left his peaceful home in Guise, and set out in the Noyon stage-coach for his new life in Paris.

One can imagine the excitement of the quickwitted, impressionable child at this entry into the strange world of France's capital city, a world where men thought and acted in such a different fashion from the citizens of Guise. Probably, however, Camille soon adapted himself to his changed surroundings ; his was not a shy or retiring temperament, and he always made friends easily and whole-heartedly.

A modern writer, M. Georges Cain, himself a pupil at Louis-le-Grand, describes his old school in no very enthusiastic terms. He speaks of it as black and gloomy enough, with its heavy-leaved gate of dread memories leading into the Rue St. Jacques. » He tells of its moss-grown playgrounds, its smoky class-rooms, its punishment chambers high up under the roof, where unfortunate culprits were stifled in summer and frozen in winter.

The college was structurally very much the same in Camille's day, although the lapse of a century may have served to increase its discomforts. In any case, it would appear that this boy's school life was a very happy one. In after years he always looked back to that time with tenderness and regret.

The College of Louis-le-Grand was at this period very fortunate in its head-master. Many of his pupils bear witness to the scholarship of the Abbe Berardier, and the love which they retained for him all through their after lives proves in itself that he was worthy to win it.

We know well what were Camille's feelings towards his teacher. Years afterwards, when the pupil was at the height of his fame, when he had won the love of Lucile Duplessis, when, as he said himself, he had nothing left to desire, he would have no other priest save his old schoolmaster to marry him and to preach the wedding sermon.

Many of Camille's contemporaries at College were destined like him to play prominent, although widely differing parts, in the days which followed. There were at least three who became prominent journalists ; J. S. Peltier of Nantes, Stanislas Freron, afterwards Camille's friend and collaborator, and Louis Francois Suleau, the brilliant and unfortunate Royalist writer, whom Camille christened the " Don Quixote of the aristocracy," and who was to die so miserably at the hands of a woman.

There was another of Camille's school companions who bore a far more famous name than these ; he was Maximilian Robespierre.

Somehow, it is difficult to imagine that Robespierre and Camille can ever have been friends — friends, that is, in the true sense of the word. Yet it is undoubted that they had a real aifection for each other, then and later, and Charlotte Robespierre could write in her memoirs : — •

" I know that my brother loved Camille Desmoullns dearly, they having studied together. . . , My brother's friendship to him was very strong : he has often told me that Camille was perhaps the one of all the prominent revolutionists whom he loved the best, after our younger brother and Saint-Just."

The two men — and therefore the two boys — were so utterly unlike in character that it must indeed have been a case of the attraction of opposites. Possibly what they found to admire in each other was the possession of those particular qualities which they themselves lacked.

Robespierre, at least in after years, may have admired and envied Camille's power of expressing himself in his writings, and thereby moving the very souls of men ; perhaps he may have envied yet more his power of inspiring love.

And Camille ? It is possible that he, who described himself, by one of his touches of genius, as the weathercock, showing the influence of each changing wind, it is possible that he may have envied Robespierre's self-sufficient, unbending nature, " which stood foursquare to every wind that blew."

Be it as it may, the two always spoke of each other with affection, even up to the end — that tragic end, when Maximilian, " my old comrade," proved so plainly what was the worth of his friendship.

Like many, one might almost say, like most young writers, Camille's first literary attempts took the form of verse-making. Indeed, he always believed that he was by nature a poet ; as he said at the end of his Hfe, writing from prison to his wife : "I was born to make verses." Nevertheless, his own opinion notwithstanding, one is bound to confess that there is little or no trace of genius in such of Camille's poetry as has survived to this day. One of his earhest attempts at versifying belongs to this period. It is a poem, written on the occasion of his leaving college, and while the verses are irreproachable in their sentiments, they are wholly undistinguished from a literary point of view.

It was certainly fortunate for the world that Camille gave up his ambition to become a poet, when he discovered within himself that power which made him finally one of the most brilliant journalists of all time.

During the years which he spent at Louis-le-Grand Camille received a very sound classical education. His knowledge of the great Latin authors was both wide and comprehensive, and it had an immense effect upon the literary style of his later years.

It was the fashion in those days for writers to overburden their pages with quotations and references from the classics. Ancient Rome and its manners of speech and thought were very much in the mode, even before the Revolution.

There was little or nothing pedantic, however, in Camille's use of classical tags and phrases. The atmosphere of Rome had become, as it were, his native air. As a consequence, his quotations have a spontaneity and an aptness which is found in the writings of no one of his contemporaries.

Camille, as we shall see later, could take the dry bones of a Latin historian, and make of them a sentient thing, his own, yet not his own. Perhaps his greatest literary work is that third number of the " Vieux Cordelier," which directly brought about his downfall. Yet it is little more than a paraphrase from Tacitus, transcribed with that touch of genius which struck at the very heart o£ the " System o£ Terror " of which the Roman " Law of Suspect " was but a prototype.

It was at College that Camille gained that scholarship which later became such a powerful weapon in his skilful hands : but it was not only the literary craftsmanship of the great writers of Rome and Athens which stirred him to admiration ; he was moved to a deep and lasting enthusiasm for the spirit of the laws of the early Republics. It was not for nothing that this boy wore out six copies of Vertot's " Revolutions Romaines " and carried with him everywhere a volume of the " Philippics " of Cicero.

We can best judge of the effects of this education from Camille's own words in 1793. In his " L'Histoire Secrete de la Revolution " he makes the well-known statement : " There were perhaps ten of us Republicans in Paris on July 12th, 1789," and in a footnote he adds, in fuller explanation of this assertion : " These republicans were, for the most part, young men who, nourished on the study of Cicero at College, were thereby impassioned in the cause of liberty. We were educated in the ideas of Rome and Athens and in the pride of republicanism, only to live abjectly under a monarchy in the reign, so to speak, of a Claudian or a Vitellius. Unwise and fatuous government, to suppose that we, filled with enthusiasm for the elders of the Capitol, could regard without horror the vampires of Versailles, or admire the past without condemning the present ; ulteriora mirari, praesentia secutura."

In this passage Camille uses the word " republican " in its literal sense, the sense in which we now understand it, namely, as one who wishes for a republican form of government.

Nevertheless it is impossible to realise the point of view of the men of that day unless we are aware that the term was habitually used during the eighteenth century in what can only be described as a theoretical and abstract way.

M. Aulard, in his masterly " Political History of the French Revolution," presents this aspect clearly and succinctly, after the most patient and exhaustive study of the political writings of the period. He entirely discredits the existence of a Republican party in France before 1789, but he beheves that the illusion has arisen through the frequent employment of the word " Republican " to denote those who were not in the least desirous of establishing a republic in France, but who hated despotism and desired some system of general social reform. In fact, as he says, there had arisen amongst the French " a republican state of mind, which was expressed by republican words and attitudes."

" A republican state of mind " — nothing could express more exactly the spirit of the time. It was a habit of thought which spread through all classes of society, from the Court downwards.

Versailles set the example, when it played with the fire which was afterwards to destroy it. Franklin and Washington could not be made the fashion without that for which they stood becoming fashionable also. La Fayette, as the hero of the populace, represented the cause for which he fought in America.

It is a generally accepted fact that the germ of the French Revolution was carried across the Atlantic by that band of ardent young men who returned to find themselves the idols of the French people, after lending their swords and their fortunes to the support of a rebellion against kingly authority.

Yet there was also inspiration to be drawn from a source nearer at hand in point of geography, if further removed by time. Although Camille and those who, like him, were of a classical turn of mind, might seek for examples amongst the heroes of antiquity, the leaders of the modern English Revolution were well-known and well-admired by the liberal Frenchmen of the reign of Louis XVI. Pym and Hampden were names to conjure with amongst the leaders of the new thought in France, and the works of Algernon Sidney were even more widely read on the Continent than in his own native country.

It was then in this atmosphere of theoretical republicanism that Camille Desmoulins grew from a boy to a man. The weathercock now for the first time vibrated to the touch of that keen northern wind, blowing from across the Atlantic, and telling of the young nation that had so lately broken the chains of royalty.

The wind was only a light breeze as yet, but it whispered of freedom and the downfall of tyranny, it recalled to Camille the memory of the spacious days of antiquity, it was the precursor of the storm, heralding that great hurricane which was so soon to sweep over France, overturning all things, both old and new, which opposed its course.

II

IT was at the beginning of the year 1784 that Camille finally left the College Louis-le-Grand and returned to Guise for a time, to study there for the Paris Bar. He was now twenty-four years old, at about the age, in fact, when modern Englishmen leave the University.

Like his comrade Robespierre, Camille probably received a handsome gratuity when he left the College. This the administrators were in the habit of bestowing upon impecunious students who had particularly distinguished themselves.

His teachers prophesied a brilliant career for the young man, and doubtless he thoroughly agreed with them. Self-depreciation was never one of Camille's faults, and unquestionably at this time he had an extremely good opinion of his own talents and capabilities.

He returned then to Guise, to his father's house, under the impression that he was certainly a person to be reckoned with, and expecting to be received with a certain amount of awe and consideration. It was not long before he made a discovery which has fallen to the lot of many another before and since, that discovery to which he afterwards bitterly referred in a letter to his father, when he said : " I know that nobody is a prophet in his own country."

The humdrum, conservative Guisards were by no means prepared to take Camille at his own somewhat high valuation. More than that, he both shocked and displeased them, and probably fully intended to do so.

We may feel quite sure that he did not keep his disquieting opinions to himself ; it was not in his nature to do this, then or afterwards.

The town of Guise in 1784 was old-world and oldfashioned in the extreme. Even as late as the year 1871, it struck M. Claretie as a " city of the past, of strange, calm, sleepy aspect." Narrow streets of sedate houses, the dwellings of prosperous, hardworking citizens were dominated by the great, fortified citadel, which towered, an emblem of decaying feudal power, on a steep ascent above the town.

Certainly Guise was not the place to encourage new ideas ; the old ones were quite good enough for these staid, well-to-do people, occupied with their own private business and pleasure.

Later it was to be otherwise. The changes in which Camille was to be so actively concerned made themselves felt even in the quiet backwater of his native town. There came a day when Guise, in that Revolutionary craze for giving new names to old things, was to re-christen itself Reunion-sur-Oise. One cannot imagine that the ultra-modern fashion became the old town well.

But all this was in the hidden future. In the meantime, rumours and hints have come down to us which prove that Camille was considered to be a very firebrand by the honest townsfolk of Guise. They thought him a dangerous revolutionary, one whom quiet folk might well be very shy of asking to their homes, who could not be trusted not to lead their sons astray, or make love to their daughters.

It is very likely that their fears were well-founded ; in both these respects Camille had undoubtedly great capabilities, from their point of view. It was rather as though an undergraduate were to return to his home in a sleepy English country town loudly voicing his opinions as a red-hot Socialist and flaunting scarlet neckties and Fabian pamphlets in the faces of his quiet law-abiding friends and relations.

Even while quite a small boy, during his first holidays from College, Camille had succeeded in scandalising the good townsfolk of Guise. It is said that one day he was arguing so loudly with his brothers and sisters, and declaiming so vehemently against tyranny, that the Prince de Conde, who was the owner of much property in the neighbourhood and who had come to see M. Desmoulins on business, took the small orator by the ear and pushed him out into the street.

A story is told of Camille's behaviour in later years at a respectable provincial dinner-party which gives a fair idea of the young man's attitude towards his neighbours at this time.

M. Jules Claretie, Camille's painstaking biographer, believes this anecdote to be much exaggerated in the version given by M. Edouard Fleury, but it probably rests on more than a slight foundation of truth, and it is, moreover, quite consistent with Camille's character as we know him.

He was staying at the house of his relation, Madame Godart, who lived at the village of Wiege, near Guise. A few local celebrities had been invited to meet the young man, whose talents were apparently admired, although distrusted.

After dinner, one of those present proceeded to make fun of Camille's well-known and loudly-expressed opinions ; it seems that the young people of Guise looked upon it as a fine joke to endeavour to provoke the hot-headed collegian into one of his fits of anger. This time the plan succeeded only too well. To the day of his death, Camille could not bear to be laughed at, and he was provoked past bearing by his companions' gibes at his Republican views.

It is said that at last he lost his temper completely, flung his napkin at the head of his opponent, and sprang upon the table, amidst the ruins of the glass and china.

He proceeded to harangue the guests from this improvised tribune, arousing the laughter of some, and the undisguised anger of others.

Stammering, with his words falHng over each other in his wild excitement, Camille poured forth his ideas, talking of an ideal Republic, of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, all of which things sounded to his amazed hearers like so many empty phrases, a mere wind of words.

Yet, after all, it was only a kind of burlesque rehearsal of that great scene five years later, in the gardens of the Palais Royal.

One can well imagine, however, the scandal which such proceedings as these must have caused in quiet, law-abiding Guise. One can picture the townsfolk shaking their worthy heads over the doings of this scapegrace of a Camille, repeating the story of his latest prank, exaggerated no doubt, but none the less thrilling for that, prophesying disgrace to the good name of Desmoulins.

It is to this period of his life that Camille's first love aftair — of a kind — would seem to belong. He had a certain affection for a little cousin of his, Flore Godart, but she was only a child, some nine years younger than himself. Camille accordingly calmly announced his intention of waiting until the girl was old enough to marry.

But the Godart family opposed the whole idea of this match very strongly on the grounds of " Camille's political opinions and the dangers to the durability and happiness of this union which were to be anticipated."

Rose Flore Amelie Godart was not to be the wife of Camille Desmoulins. Only a short time afterwards he met the one woman who was really to win his heart, and from that day it is to be feared that poor Flore had no real existence as far as Camille was concerned. In 1792 she was married to M. Tarrieux de Taillan.

Nevertheless, years later, we catch a faint echo o£ the old dead-and-gone love affair. Lucile, Camille's wife, has heard some rumour of the business, and she is delightfully and quite unreasonably jealous. Here is what Camille himself writes to his father on July 9th,

1793 '—

" You complain that I do not write to you. . . . Lucile is so frightened that I shall be seized with a desire to embrace you that she would be alarmed if she saw me writing ; so I am taking advantage of the office provided by the Committee of War, of which I have been made Secretary, to write to you freely without her seeing over my shoulder that I am writing to Guise, I imagine that the cause of her anxiety is the recollection of some cousin who has been mentioned to her."

In the meanwhile, the time which Camille spent at his birthplace was not wasted. He was industriously studying law, and he took his bachelor's degree in the September of 1784. There is no doubt that these legal studies were an advantage to him in his future career. They gave him that reasoning faculty, that power of setting forth a case which he undoubtedly possessed, and without which his brilliancy and wit would have lacked that ballast which made his arguments carry conviction to his readers.

Camille seems to have passed his examinations creditably ; he became a licentiate in the spring of 1785, and was sworn later in the same year as an advocate to the Parliament of Paris.

Having attained to this position, he was now, of course, obliged to take up his residence permanently in the capital, and we have no reason to suppose that he felt any particular regret at leaving Guise.

He had been keenly disappointed by his reception in his birthplace. Even after he became a successful man, Camille never quite lost a certain feeling of soreness where the Guisards were concerned.

We read this plainly in his letters to his father. Although he protests that he takes no further interest in Guise, that he wishes to cut himself off from the provincial narrowness of his native town, one can see plainly beneath the surface of his v/ords that he is eager to prove to his unappreciative fellow-townsmen that their estimate of him was not the true one. One of the sharpest spurs to his ambition was the desire to make a great name in order that Guise might be humbled and be forced to allow that Camille Desmoulins was a son of whom she might well be proud.