Completing My Previous Saint-Just Post...

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

I didn't link correctly the page on Saint-Just's portraits, it's actually a full dossier on an iconographical study of Saint-Just. It gets slightly unnerving when the author of the site starts speaking of Deviant Art and Fan Art. Fandom meets History. ^^; Apart from it, there's a nice section on souvenirs from the Bicentenaire, with these two medals I had never seen before:





Awesome, aren't they? What's interesting with the second one is that they made a series of those medals with French Revolution "couples" *coughs*: Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Marat and Hébert, Danton and Desmoulins and Robespierre and Saint-Just. *re-coughs*

Also, I'm bringing your attention on The Saint-Just Action Figures Figurines and The Saint-Just Stamps. This one is very lovely:



Also, citoyennemiyuki, you made it on her website. Uh-huh.

Hm. I hope she'll never make a study of fanfiction.......

Finally, check her page on the engravings -- there are some rare finds in there! Particularly, this one from the Centenaire in 1889, which is really nice and this one in my icon that I FINALLY see in colour!!!


A second point to this post, I found the Communist Militants of Arras (that's so cute, btw), announcing the play "Thermidor" in two days. And there is a very lovely re-interpretation of a Thermidor painting:



Looks like Robespierre is even more crumbling. Nice to see someone else saw that the person holding him back ought to be Saint-Just.

Modes of Address

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I've got a few questions about the use of names and modes of address. Did people, in 18thc France, use their forenames socially (OK, there's Camille Desmoulins - but then he was 'special'- and even then, I've seen documents that hyphenate his name, maybe the typesetter thinking it was part of his surname)?

For example, in modern fiction and films, Robespierre is often called "Max' or 'Maxime' with friends, but I can't remember any bit of contemporary writing/memoir I've seen where he's called anything other than Robespierre, though I dimly remember a possibly facetious "Maximilien' I came across flipping through 'Revolutions de Paris'. So, is there any reference to him being called by or using his forename? (Maybe by his brother or sister? Camille in a letter?) There are also anecdotes that say he preferred 'Monsieur' and 'vous' to 'Citizen' and 'tu', but I don't know how reliable these are (one is from Barras' memoirs so presumably hostile): are there letters etc that back this story up?

Were forenames really only for use by parents to children and wives to husbands, and/or to please relatives at baptism, and/or to differentiate people from their relatives on documents? In Britain, at least, men only used surnames to each other in formal situations until recently: now if a newsreader were to say 'Brown' rather than 'Gordon Brown', it would seem hostile somehow, but in 1980 it would have been the other way around (and I suspect there are narky old retired colonels who think this is a dreadful bit of lefty hippy informality and a sign that society has gone to the dogs!) . Anyway, I was wondering...