revolution_fr | (no subject)

Hello. Some little things - which I suppose are easier to take for granted...

First: I somehow feel guilty asking this, since it's not very useful either way (yes, let me deprecate myself a moment more) - else I might have brought it up earlier as it's been bothering me vaguely for years - but since I'd like to finally strike it off my 'wtf' list, I'm just going to put it out there: I recall reading on this site (incidentally, is it gone?) that Desmoulins was a "rumored" bisexual. Since then I have found this addressed in all of one place: Mantel's novel. Somehow, a work of fiction and the internet just don't do it for me, so I was wondering if anyone here knows of any reference to Camille's sexuality coming from a legit source? Or anything that isn't fictional outright, at least? Or is it just something the author of that site might have absorbed from fiction? Or both?!

Second: Okay, maybe this is just silly. But can anyone tell me more about the lock of Robespierre's hair at the Musée Carnavalet? ...and why it's white?

By the way, I'd like to suggest that since this community has separate tags under "desmoulins" and "camille desmoulins" that they be merged together. (Of course I am stupid about such things.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

...Or like other people were saying up thread, the hair could have just lost its pigment or something.

So, bisexual or not, there was definitely *something* "deviant" about Camille.

I've always been surprised that Danton would slag someone off for having a vice! Or is it some off-the-cuff comment he made that becomes a 'shameful vice' when filtered through Robespierre-consciousness? So it could be anything....!
It could, if he means deviances as applied to writing, be laudanum (look at his English contemporary, Coleridge, total junkie!) - Desmoulins was having health problems at the time...

I suspect Danton referred dismissively to Camille for something specific, which Robespierre, being himself, was far too prudish to actually write down. And you're right, it could be anything. He could have been bisexual, he could have been sleeping with Annette (incest in the 18th century definition of it), he could have been a junkie, who knows. But that is the historical origin for the bisexuality rumor.

Hilary Mantel also has some innuendo about services rendered to the gay lawyer Desmoulins worked for - but I have no idea where she got that from (she apparently wrote and rewrote the book over many years so may have dug something up in an archive that regular historians ignore?). I haven't read Royalist / right-wing pamphlets of the period, but I presume they'd have gossip and innuendo in them (??). Maybe it's not too dissimilar to today, where you hear a lot of lurid stories about politicians that never make it into print (very lurid, in Westminster bars!). (Somewhat off-piste, but there was always a sense that Mandelson, now EU trade commissioner, fancied Blair, to whom he was fanatically loyal -which led to this long-running slashy sketch show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEQMfIhffo4&feature=related )

I always figured that was fictional (as far as we know!), just part of establishing Camille's fictional back story and the fact that he swung both ways.

Oh my gosh I am totally going to write an epic historical novel where Camille is an incestuous bisexual junkie who hires a manservant to spank him with a volume of Montesquieu while he masturbates to Royalist propaganda. I'm bound to get at least one of them right.

I'm sorry, that was not very virtuous of me. ;_;

Sounds like T.E. Lawrence - well, the S&M bit! They had his medical report in the Imperial War Museum - buttock scars - so that rumour was true! (and I suppose I was very prurient to be reading through it for that, rather than its Interesting Military Value or whatever!)

I'd read it.

XD!