revolution_fr | Saint-Just (Reply)

Another translation of a "portrait" from Humanité. This time of Saint-Just.

PORTRAIT. 220 YEARS AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Conscience of the Revolution

1767-1794. By his desire for a just social order, by his talent as an orator, and by the intensity of his thought, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just deserves much better than that stereotype created by those who are nostalgic for the monarchy, who outlined a portrait of him as an “archangel of death.”

Saint-Just is often represented with the features of a fanatic. Of a kind of bloodthirsty vampire, or at best, of a purist on the edge of insanity and depression. Take Wajda’s Danton, for example, or the Lambert Wilson’s character in the Chouans. Yet, his youth aside, nothing in Louis-Antoine Saint-Just’s lightning career justifies this iconography. Doubtless, the young man was enthusiastic: at just twenty-five years old, in 1792, he was the youngest deputy in the Convention. He was also one of its most brilliant orators. A kind of dreamer, for whom the Revolution is a means of making reality a utopia: a more equitable society. In killing him, the Convention deprived itself of one who will have incarnated the future.

We possess few of the facts of his life before the Revolution. We know that he was born on the 25^th of August 1767, in Decize, in the Nièvre. His father was a former soldier, who had obtained the rank of captain and the distinction of chevalier of the order of Saint-Louis in recompense for his services. When he leaves the army in 1777, he takes possession, with his family (two daughters and Louis-Antoine), of a residence he has just inherited, in Blérancourt, in the Aisne. But he dies when his son is still only a child of twelve. The adolescent’s mother sends him to a boarding school run by the Oratorians in Soissons, and then he studies law in Reims at the same time as Brissot and Danton. Until then, his trajectory was rather linear. But when he returns to Blérancourt, everything is turned upside down: in 1787, at just twenty years old, and idle, the young man runs away to Paris, “borrowing” the family silver. Which is not really to his mother’s taste: she obtains a lettre de cachet which has him committed for several months to the correctional home of Picpus. It is perhaps there, according to historians, that his hatred of the arbitrary and of absolute power is born in him. In prison, in 1789, he writes his first work, Organ[t], a sort of erotic-blasphemous poem which already condemns the monarchy. Which is not neutral in a system where the king has absolute power. Even if Organ[t]’s eight thousand lines remain anecdotal, they already denote a temperament prompt to rebellion.

When the Revolution breaks out, Saint-Just is barely twenty-two; he is at the first lodges, in Paris. When he returns to Blérancourt, he becomes wholeheartedly involved; in July 1789, he becomes a lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard. And he will be part of the escort that accompanies the king back to Paris from Varenne[s]. But the borders of his province do not suffice him. In 1790, he writes Robespierre a petitioning letter wherein he informs him of tax problems in Blérancourt. But a letter which transpires admiration too, and which does not leave Maximilien Robespierre indifferent. A letter which begins with, “You, whom, like God, I know only by miracles, I address myself to you.” Saint-Just’s engagement is such that he is elected in September 1791, to the Legislative Assembly. But he is too young and must turn back to his province. It is simply the next year, in 1792, that he is elected deputy of the Aisne to the National Convention. He immediately rallies the Montagnards, of whom he very quickly becomes one of the most brilliant orators.

It is the king’s trial, in November 1792, which makes Saint-Just famous. When the debate blusters, Saint-Just, with his lapidary formulas, brings it back to the essential: “For myself, I see no middle way: this man must reign or die,” he says. “One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of it is only too obvious. Every king is a rebel and a usurper,” he continues. “When a people are cowardly enough to let themselves be led by tyrants, domination is the right of the first comer, and is no more sacred or more legitimate upon the head of one than another,” he assails a dumbfounded and quickly conquered audience. His conclusion is almost visionary on the way we have been made to weep for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette for the past two hundred years: “Louis fought the people: he has been defeated. He is a barbarian, a foreign prisoner of war. You have seen his perfidious designs; you have seen his army; the traitor was not the king of the French, he was the king of a few conspirators. […] He must be judged promptly: he’s a kind of hostage being kept by rogues. They seek to stir up pity. Soon they will buy tears; they will do everything to interest us, even to corrupt us. People, if the king is every absolved, remember that we will no longer be worthy of your trust and you will be able to accuse us of perfidy.” He then plays an important role in the drafting of the Constitution of 1793. A member of the Committee of Public Safety before Robespierre, he works on a project for a Montagnard constitution, opposing Condorcet and Hérau[l]t de Seychelles head-on. “All the tyrants had their eyes on us when he judged one of their kind: now that you have the milder destiny of considering the world’s liberty, the peoples, who are the true great ones of the Earth, contemplate you in their turn,” he says to the Convention in April 1793. “If you want the Republic, attach yourselves to the people and do everything entirely for them. The form of their happiness is simple, and happiness is not farther from peoples than it is from the private man. A simple government is one where the people are independent under just laws and guarantees, and where the people have no need to resist oppression, because they cannot be oppressed,” he recommends. The Constitution of the Year I, at last, will never be applied. But straightaway Saint-Just tries to give it a very strong social and egalitarian inflection. With Robespierre and Couthon, he forms a kind of triumvirate within the Committee of Public Safety.

It is moreover the same Committee of Public Safety that sends him to the front as a representative to the Armies of the Rhine and of the North. The year 1793 has been dreadful for the French: the Vendée has risen up, the English have taken Toulon… and France is in a very bad position. In Strasbourg, he shows at once his physical courage and his military aptitudes. The situation is perilous. The Committee of Public Safety has one motto: be victorious or die. Saint-Just will demonstrate inflexibility: he has deserters shot; he discharges officers responsible for defeats. He galvanizes the troops too. In Strasbourg, he applies the terror but also has the public prosecutor arrested. The military victories of Landau, then Fleurus (26 June 1794) owe much to him.

At the same time, Saint-Just finds himself involved in all the trials of factions of the time, from the Girondins to the Hébertistes and the Indulgents. It is this determination that earns him the name of exterminating angel. Which is to forget a bit rapidly that the same man advocated redistributing the fortunes of the rich to the most indigent, as he proposes in his two works, the “Spirit of the Revolution” and the “Fragments on the Republican Institutions.” Michel Vovelle considers on his subject that he “is one of those who push the Mountain’s social reflection the farthest.” Moreover, on 8 Ventôse Year II, he proposes laws to redistribute the properties of suspects to the indigent: “The wretched are the powers of the Earth; they have the right to speak as masters to the governments which neglect them.”

Robespierre is the one who recalls Saint-Just to Paris, during his military campaigns. The young man finds his friend very isolated within the Committee. He attempts conciliatory meetings in vain. Then he takes Robespierre’s side. On 9 Thermidor he tries to read a much less severe text than that delivered by Robespierre the day before. He is interrupted two paragraphs in and does not even try to take back the floor. He remains, moreover, of an Olympian calm and total silence to the scaffold the next day. In the preamble to his fragments [of the Republican Institutions], a kind of challenge: “I despise the dust of which I am composed and which speaks to you. This dust may be persecuted and put to death. But I defy anyone to take from me that independent life that I have given myself in the centuries and in the skies.” Neither angel of death, nor maniac, Saint-Just was just a man who put his life in the service of the Revolution. A utopian idealist? For whom “the revolution must stop at the perfection of happiness.”

Caroline Constant

Translation by estellacat.