Camille Desmoulins??

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

While writing a paper on fashion caricature in the French Revolution, I ran across this image of Camille Desmoulins by an English engraver named Richard Newton.  It was published on June 10, 1795.  This is the watercolor and ink version of an engraving that is captioned "DESMOULINS and LUCILE.  A COPY of the following LETTER from the celebrated CAMILLE DESMOULINS to his WIFE, has lately been published in PARIS.  It was found among his Papers."

I guess death really does do great things for your image.

Comments

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I guess death really does do great things for your image.
Especially when said death can be used by one country to make another country with which the first is at war look bad. >__>

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

This is true, but Camille was still a Nasty Regicide, so it surprises me to see him used.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

They seem to forget that detailed for any non-Robespierriste guillotined under the Terror, for some reason. (I suppose so they can say, "see look how horrible they are; they're even too awful for other regicides to stand.")

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Oh... Desmoulins?... We're all so... surprised. O.o;

So the Anglo-Saxon myth on Desmoulins is that old...

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

Huh, what movie is your Film!David from?

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

It's from Benoît Jacquot's Sade film with Daniel Auteuil (2000) in which there are, oddly enough, two scenes with Robespierre, and some references to him in the rest of the film: the first being with David, preparing the Feast to the Supreme Being (http://pics.livejournal.com/maelicia/pic/0011ze34) and the second scene being... Thermidor. The goal of the film being to obviously prove pr0n and materialism is a much safer position to adopt than revolutionary ideals and deism, because in the end, it all goes back to the same, except that the first live and the second die. That's what the years 2000 do to ideology. .___.

P.S. It's also the film known as the one in which Maxime, though being incredibly cute (for once!), has a wig made of a cat-sheep hybrid. Also, the film having a David actually looking like himself (!!).

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

Jeez, now Maxime did like his fashion, but I feel that outfit is a touch *too* incroyable there.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Which Anglo-Saxon myth?

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

The one in which Desmoulins became a superhero of the freedom of speech and the only revolutionary worth speaking of because he's so nice, sweet and bouncy and represents the bourgeois couple in love, which the evil Robespierre Saint-Just destroyed. As in A Place of Greater Safety. Though that myth is also sort of French -- just that we can't tell, because those who adopt it are more likely to be pro-Anglo-Saxon French.

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

That's the classic version. For modern renditions you have to tack of "adorable bisexual manslut."

[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

Right, I suspect it's become a little more hazy, especially since developments like his becoming BFF of the Anti-Republic for a while there (thx Mathiez). I'm not sure what exactly the mythology is supposed to be now, and secretly wonder if anyone else knows.

[trf-chan.livejournal.com]

Icon!Camille really must protest this. D:

Unless Camille had a secret fetish for dressing up like that when no one was around. Who knows? :o

Random stupid - at first I thought the ebil!sans-culotte at the window was a poster. -_- Until I realized that:

A. There weren't posters back then
B. Camille would be unlikely to have an ebil!sans-culotte poster

...It was 7:00 A.M. and I had just woken up. Yes, indeed, that's my excuse. XD;;;;;

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

They did have posters, I think - didn't Marat go around sticking 'kill em all!' notices all over the place? Or someone did, anyway. It's late here and I'm not remembering things very well.

[trf-chan.livejournal.com]

Well, probably not posters as we consider them in the contemporary sense, though. XD

[kurotoshi.livejournal.com]

//didn't Marat go around sticking 'kill em all!' notices all over the place?//

No, he didn't. -_-;;

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

They seem to have invented the nude calendar girl, though...

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I think Camille Desmoulins is dressed that way for the same reason there is an ebil!sansculotte at the window: ignorance about what was really going on in France. (People often were, after all, still dressing that way in the P.A. in 1794, so, as with the ebil!sans-culotte, the engraver's just going on his (obviously incorrect) assumptions.)

[livviebway.livejournal.com]

Sorry, what is the P.A.?

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

It's my personal abbreviation for the Perfidious Albion (or le perfide albion), which was a term used not infrequently for England in France during the Revolution (and later too, apparently).

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I was really surprised when I saw that pic, because Desmoulins really didn't figure in most 20thc British history books - if mentioned at all, it was very briefly, in the Vieux Cordelier context (Hampson just has him as the mad one who ballsed up Robespierre's clemency plans!): that meant - wonderfully - the main 'romantic/sexual' image I had of him growing up in the 80's was as Robespierre's ex/object of desire, care of Wajda's film and Pam Gems' play (both versions of Stani's play). I suspect the French regard Desmoulins now as a 100% red-blooded hetero hero (viz, Mark Steel's book quoting the 1989 French minister on Danton, "I like a man who screws" - which is why he's excused September, I suppose - if Robespierre had screwed a few prozzies, he'd have statues everywhere!), but it's fun to juxtapose Camille's prison letter with a letter from a very smug Conventionnel dated 11 Thermidor starting "Robespierre has gone to join Camille Desmoulins" - which just makes me think of them tripping merrily through the Elysian fields, a la 'Gladiator'...).

[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

Death gave him a nose job. This ruins everything.