Louis Antoine De Saint-Just

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was born at Decize in the former Nivernais province of France. He was the eldest of three children of Louis Jean de Saint-Just de Richebourg a retired French cavalry officer who died when he was three and of the 20-years younger Marie-Anne Robinot, the daughter of a notary.

The family later moved north and in 1776 settled in the village of Blérancourt in the former Picardy province living off the rent of their lands and maintaining the life of minor nobility.  Saint Just attended a Oratorian school where possibly fictitious tales of leading a student rebellion and efforts to burn down the school come down to us.

He fell in love with a local girl called Thérèse Gellé. She was the daughter of another notary one whom however was richer and more influential than Saint Just family.  Apparently when Saint-Just was away from town Gelle was married to Emmanuel Thorin the son of another noble family and considered a more fitting match.  Upon returning to town Saint Just was apparently heartbroken.  He fled the family home taking with him a large proportion of the family silver which he sold in a Parisian café.  He was eventually tracked down by the police and interrogated and imprisoned in a reformatory for six months.

Saint-Just at his mother’s prompting enrolled as a student at the School of Law, Reims University.  After a year he left and returned home seemingly without any future prospects.  It is possible that during his time as an inmate, student and then unemployed youth that he wrote Organt.  A medieval epic it was based around the fictional travails of a twenty year old illegitimate son of an archbishop.  It took satirical sideswipes against the church (it was dedicated to the Vatican), the monarchy and the nobility.  It suggested the ills of modern society were due to increasing inequality.  It also had some pornographic passages.   It did not sell well.  It was banned by the authorities.  Saint-Just reflected in its preface possibly looking at his life, the poem or both, “I am twenty; I have done badly; I could do better.”

With the coming of the revolution the previously rigid hierarchy of Blérancourt's was radically altered.  Their attempts were not successful until 1790 when Blérancourt held its first open municipal elections. Saint-Just's took on key roles in village as mayor, secretary, and, in the case of his brother-in-law, head of the local National Guard.  Saint-Just despite not meeting the legal age and tax qualifications, was allowed to join the Guard.

He did well in the Guard rising to Lieutenant Colonel in a matter of months.  He impressed locals by placing his hand in the flame of a burning anti-revolutionary pamphlet whilst emphasising his devotion to the Republic.  It was during this time period when he began to write to Desmoulins and Robespierre.  He also used his time to write L'Esprit de la Revolution et de la constitution de France, (The Spirit of the Revolution and the Constitution of France) published in the spring of 1791. The document stressed how France was not suited to a Republic and its best form of a government would be a Constitutional Monarchy. He condemned the early violence of the revolution and also stressed the author’s committed stance against the death penalty. His timing was unfortunate as it was published the royals made their ill-fated attempted escape from the Tuileries.  The opinions of Paris, France and Saint-Just changed seemingly overnight.

Saint-Just was elected to the National Convention from the department of Aisne during the tumultuous year of 1792 when war had been declared on Austria and Louis XVI effectively deposed by an attack on the Tuileries Palace.  His maiden speech to the convention on the 13th November 1792 was remembered by all as an open condemnation of the King when he declared that “Royalty is an eternal crime.”  He declared that as long as Louis lived he would be a threat to the revolution and should be executed forthwith without the need for a trial.  Robespierre in a later speech echoed Saint-Just sentiments and signalled a closeness to Saint Just politically.  In December the king was taken to a trial before the Convention, sentenced to death, and executed on 21 January 1793.

Saint Just submitted proposals for a new constitution on April 24th 1793.  Saint Just demands were similar to many other revolutionaries.  He was made part of the five man team to come up with a finalised document.  Alongside the five other constitution crafters he was added to the new Committee of Public Safety.  The new constitution was completed and ratified as law on 24th June 1793.  However on October 10th 1793 it was declared that the government of France was to be “revolutionary until the peace,” meaning many of the articles within the document were suspended.

It would appear that Saint Just remained initially quiet on the increasing divisions between the Girondins and the Mountanard.  However after the events of the 2nd of June 1793 were the Convention was surrounded by sans culottes and national guardsmen and the Girondins arrested he took a more active role.  When Committee finally came to a conclusion as to the punishment for the Girondins it was Saint-Just who delivered the report to the Convention. In his speech to the Convention he demanded the harshest of punishments and the Convention acquiesced to his demands as Brissot and twenty Girondins were executed on 31st October 1793.  It was during these days of paranoia that Saint Just was able to pass the Law of Suspects on 17th September 1793.  This gave the government not only the power to arrest anyone who was opposed to the revolution but also those who were deemed not to show enough enthusiasm for  the revolution.

Seeing the increasing desperate straits the Revolutionary armies were in Saint Just called for the Convention and its deputies to directly oversee military efforts.  This was passed on the 10th October 1793.  Saint Just journeyed to the Army of the Rhine where he promptly dismissed officers and generals deemed to failing.  Those seen as damaging the French cause were executed by firing squad.  His work seemed to be effective as the army stabilised and was even able to launch an invasion of the German Rhineland.  When he applied the same methods to the Army of the North they were able to win the decisive Battle of Fleurus which pushed the Austrians out of Belgium on 25th June 1794.

On the 19th of February 1794 (Year III 1st day of Ventose)  he was elected President of the National Convention.  It was then that he passed the Ventose Decrees which was designed to confiscated aristocratic émigré lands which would be redistributed to the most needy within society.  Such seemingly radical actions however did not sate some faction.  Jacques Hebert poured scorn on the Jacobins from his newspaper Le Pere Duchesne.  Saint Just declared that that "whoever vilified or attacked the dignity of the revolutionary government should be condemned to death."  On 24th of March 1794 the Revolutionary Tribunal sent Hebert and his associates to the guillotine.

On the 31 March 1794 the Committee of Public Safety turned their attentions to another perceived threat when Saint delivered a report on Georges Danton and his colleagues who were referred to as the “last partisans of royalism.”  On the 5th of April 1794 they would be sent to the guillotine as Saint Just promised that there would be a “final cleansing” of the Republic’s enemies.  It was in the wake of these incidents that Saint Just created a new police for the Committee of Public Safety and passed the Law of 22 Prairial (10th of June  1794) which removed the testimony of defence witnesses in the Revolutionary Tribune and left death as the only punishment available to the condemned.  However in the wake of the success at the Battle of Fleurus there were increasing demands for a slowing down of the terror and a full implementation of the 1793 Constitution.

It was in the wake of these demands that Robespierre appeared at the Convention on 26 July (8th Thermidor, year II) and delivered a two-hour-long speech. The speech was partially a defence of his policies and actions.  However he also stressed that the threat to the revolution had not passed and that there were people in the very convention who were threats to the very principles they had fought for and he had a list of the names of the guilty.  Robespierre however refused to name who he suspected and many feared their name was on his list.

Saint-Just began to give a speech the following day in support of Robespierre. However he was only partially into his speech when Jean-Lambert Tallien interrupted him  Saint Just attempted to carry on but it was clear that the Convention would not support him this time. Robespierre then attempted to secure the tribune to speak, but was shouted down, soon deputies were calling for his arrest.  As Robespierre struggled to respond one deputy shouted, "The blood of Danton chokes him!"  The convention ordered the arrest of Robespierre his brother Augustin, Couthon, Saint-Just, François Hanriot, and Le Bas.  Chaos reigned as troops from the commune marched against the Convention while they in turn called on troops.  They were rescued by Hanriot and found refuge at the Hotel de Ville.  However upon being surrounded by troops Augustin Robespierre threw himself out of a window seeking to avoid capture, only to break both of his legs; Couthon was found lying at the bottom of a staircase; Le Bas shot himself in the head standing right next to Saint Just.  Robespierre apparently tried to kill himself with a pistol but managed only to shatter his lower jaw.  When they were led out only Saint Just was able to give an air of coolness and indeed the only one to walk unaided.

On 28 July 1794, Saint Just was led to the guillotine.  Saint-Just reputedly did not fear death and he mounted the scaffold with confidence. At a last formality of identification, he gestured to a copy of the Constitution of 1793 and said, "I am the one who made that."

Saint-Just speaks at the trial of Louis XVI on  13th November 1792.  Taken from Regicide and Revolution speeches at the trial of Louis XVI, Columbia University Press, New York (1992)  p124

He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused its laws; he must die to assure the tranquillity of the people, since to assure his own, he intended that the people be crushed.  Did he not review the troops before combat? Did he not take flight rather than halt their fire?  What steps did he take to quell the fury of the soldiers? The suggestion is made that you judge him as a citizen, whereas you recognise that he was not a citizen, and that, far from protecting the people, he had them sacrificed to people.

I will say more: a Constitution accepted by a king did not bind citizens; they had, even before his crime, the right to proscribe him and to send him into exile.  To judge a king as a citizen, that will astound a dispassionate posterity.  To judge is to apply the law; law supposes a common share in justice; and what justice can be common to humanity and kings? What has Louis in common with the French people that they should treat him well after he betrayed them?

A man of great spirit might say, in another age, that a king should be accused, not for the crimes of his administration, but for the crime of having been king, as that is an usurpation which nothing on earth can justify.  With whatever illusions, whatever conventions, monarchy cloaks itself, it remains an eternal crime against which every man has the right to rise and to arm himself.  Monarchy is an outrage which even the blindness of an entire people cannot justify; the people, by the example it gave, is guilty before nature, and all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy such domination wherever it may be found.

No man can reign innocently.  The folly is all too evident.  Every king is a rebel and an usurper.

Saint-Just speaks at the trial of Louis XVI on 27th December 1792.  Taken from Regicide and Revolution speeches at the trial of Louis XVI, Columbia University Press, New York (1992)  p176

Some will say that the Revolution is over, that we have nothing more to fear from the tyrant, and that henceforth the law would decree the death of a usurper.  But, citizens tyranny is like a reed which bends with the wind and which rises again.  What do you call a Revolution? The fall of a throne, a few blows levied at a few abuses?  The moral order is like the physical; abuses disappear for an instant, as the dew dries in the morning, and as it falls again with the night, so the abuses will reappear.  The Revolution begins when the tyrant ends.

Barère on a Saint-Just proposal in 1794.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 2, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p139-140

Saint-Just had such indifference that, about this time, he came one evening to propose to the committee a strange means of promptly ending the struggle of the revolution against the suspected and imprisoned nobles. These were his words : " For a thousand years the nobility have been oppressing the French nation with exactions and feudal vexations of every kind ; feudalism and nobility exist no longer ; you want to repair all the frontier roads for the passage of the artillery, convoys, and transports of our army ; order the imprisoned nobles to go to work daily and mend the highways."

The truth must be told, and justice rendered to whom it is due ; when this writing appears I shall be in my tomb, I shall be suspected neither of lies nor flattery at that time, when probably none of the Committee of Public Safety will survive. When Saint- Just had finished there was a movement of silent indignation amongst us all, succeeded by a unanimous demand for the order of the day. I thought I ought to stipulate for the national character by saying to Saint-Just and the committee that we should be opposed to such a kind of punishment for prisoners even if the law pronounced it ; that the nobility could be abolished by wise laws, but that the nobles always preserved in the mass of the people a rank, a dis- tinction due to education, which prevented us from acting at Paris as Marius did at Rome. " Ah ! " exclaimed Saint-Just, " Marius was more politic and a greater statesman than you will ever be. I wished to try the strength, the temperament, and the opinion of the Committee of Public Safety. You are not fit to combat nobility, since you cannot destroy it ; it will devour the Revolution and the revolutionists. I retire from the committee." He quickly withdrew, and set out for the army, until the moment when he thought himself capable of executing vaster projects with Robespierre, Couthon, and Lebas, his associates.

Barère on the events of Thermidor.  Taken from Memoirs of Bertrand Barère Volume 2, H. S. Nichols, London (1896) p179-181

Saint-Just came stealthily to the tribune and read a speech to the Convention, in which he had the cowardice to attack the members of the committee in their absence, without any of the members being forewarned of the denunciation to reply to it. Tallien interrupted the speech for a moment, the only service he did that day, for which he vidshed to assign to himself all the honours. Robespierre, more curled and powdered than usual, is in his place near the tribune. He watches the effect the discourse is to produce. When Saint-Just denounces the opinions and works of the committee, the astonishment and indignation caused by so much cowardice and injustice produce murmurs in the Assembly. Tallien—who knows perfectly that he is one of the eighteen proscribed deputies, whose accusation is to be discussed on that day after the attack directed against the committee, which defended the lives of these eighteen deputies — with equal ingenuity and courage, profits by the first moment of public disapprobation to complain that Saint-Just is attacking the members of the committee in their absence, and demands that the speech be suspended till they be warned to come into the Assembly at once.That was the only thing Tallien did on the 9th of Thermidor. This simple fact was then too well known to the public to attribute to him the great influence which the agents of Coblenz and his contra- revolutionary friends have sought to give him since.

After the usher of the Convention had informed us, we all went to the meeting. I was by no means the last. I was asked to combat these ambitious dictators. On entering the hall I obtain permission to speak on measures of general safety. Saint-Just wishes to submit his discourse to the committee, but several deputies demanded the continuation of the reading, and afterwards that it be signed by its author, and deposited on the table to be a part of the minutes. After these preliminaries I mount the tribune. I was going to present the decree on the armed force of the sections when Robespierre ran and stood at my side, politely asking to speak to what was called the centre of the Assembly. He counted on this majority, which has always been a great force in number and inertia. This time the immobility of this quarter showed me that they were observant, awaiting the manifestation of the Assembly and of the galleries which had been crowded from five o'clock that morning. There were murmurs and signs of approbation, but their cause was unknown. They seemed to wish for order, and to depend on some object or individual. These great assemblies must be seen when agitated by unusual events or by strong passions to get an idea of the fluctuation of opinions and versatility of wishes. At last, in this tumultuous uncertainty, several cried out, "Down with the tyrant ! Hear Barere!" These cries, instead of hushing the tumult, increased it. At last I got a hearing. They show that the accusation of tyranny struck the head of Robespierre, and that I got a hearing by a unanimous and contrary sentiment….

Robespierre, hat in hand, again addresses the Assembly from the bar in front of the tribune, and begs to be heard before the reporter of the committee begins to speak. The cries, " Down with the tyrant ! Let Barere speak ! " …. Whilst I was speaking, my brother, who was behind the president's chair, observed Robespierre's movements. He was always agitated in the tribune. My brother and his neighbours feared that he would attempt to take my life, so violent was his fit of anger and convulsion….. This man was barbarous with the sword of the law or the iron of the revolution, but not man to man. I continued my reports, and Robespierre stayed in the tribune. He still hoped to get a hearing. A part of the Assembly was still doubtful. I was always reheard. Then I presented this proclamation….

Scarcely was the decree of proclamation voted, when a crowd demanded Robespierre's impeachment, and his descent to the bar for self-defence ; others wanted his arrest. These two motions suddenly changed the indifference of the centre into a movement conformable to that of the upper benches of the Mountain. Then I saw Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just beaten. Public opinion abandoned them. They were arrested and impeached. The Assembly, astonished or perhaps frightened at its own courage and decrees, separated at five o'clock, adjourning till nine in the evening.