Georges (Aristide) Couthon
Oct. 7th, 2009 10:15 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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revolution_frThe last Humanité "portrait" requested. (I may translate a few of my own choosing as well, or if anyone has any more requests...) As the title of this post indicates, it's on Couthon. This one is a bit more... literary, than the others. Which is unsurprising, given that the author also wrote a novel about Couthon's son, Antoine. Needless to say, this is what he means when he says the "knows" him, not that he's secretly 200 years old.
So, without further ado:
Couthon is an Old Comrade
1755-1794. I knew his son Antoine, with whom I rubbed shoulders in the Puy-de-Dôme, in Moscow, and in Santa Margherita Ligure, well. We got along all the better, not lacking points in common. Beginning with a left-handed wife and a liking for cherries and majestic landscapes.
Couthon himself, the father, I’ve crossed his path many times. In my last year of primary school, when he was already Robespierre’s friend and when he became my friend, since the friends of our friends are our friends; at the Sorbonne, where he was still Robespierre’s friend, and therefore François Hincker’s friend; in the eighties, when I frequented him a lot. He was very impressive, but very mild. I don’t understand why he was nicknamed “the Bloodthirsty Tiger.” Of course, there is the law of Prairial to reinforce what they call the Terror, without really understanding what the word “terror” meant in French at the time. Of course, that law sent innocent citizens to the guillotine. But it was not thirst for blood that motivated Couthon, I guarantee you. And then, the tiger is not necessarily the ferocious animal and the inexorable father that the dictionaries say it is. It is also royal, elegant, simply wild. Here and there brilliant minds have understood: Clemenceau, Raphaël Meltz, and Laetitia Bianchi – and let’s not forget Mao, who jeered at paper tigers.
You can see Couthon’s chair in the museum. It’s a sort of wheelchair upholstered in lemon-yellow. [At his death] he had lost the use of his legs for two years. The night of 9 Thermidor, in the chaos and the crush, he tried to flee on the shoulders of a gendarme the Convention had allotted to him, but he was arrested, laid on stretcher, his pearl-grey culottes stained with urine, carried onto the scaffold – but it is impossible to make his neck fit in the window of the guillotine, not even on his back, so they put it aside and at nearly 6:50, the executioner lets go of the cord that releases the blade.
But let’s resume things from the beginning.
Couthon was born in December 1755, a month after the Lisbon earthquake which will disturb Candide. He is born into a milieu of men of law and merchants. He studies law. He becomes a lawyer. Notably, he defends the poor. He denounces the privileges of the nobility. He frequents literary societies and delivers a pretty speech on patience. He even amuses himself by writing a few plays. People gladly praise his good character and talent.
All in all, his is the classic profile of a man of the 1780s. He follows the events of the spring of 1789 from rather far-off, which is to say from Clermont. He is no les passionate and revolutionary in his fashion for all that. In October, he proposes a charitable subscription for the destitute: “By anticipating the pressing needs of the poor, you will make them better and arrive infallibly at the security of the rich.” It’s not Lenin, properly speaking.
He asserts himself as a Jacobin. Despite the beginnings of his paralysis, he is elected to the Legislative Assembly in the autumn of 1791 and shows himself active there. Following that, he becomes a Montagnard, but slowly. He does not have excessive sympathy for the sans-culottes, nor for that other sick man, Marat. He enters the Committee of Public Safety and defends the Terror, but, if he shows firmness, he observes a certain clemency, as his attitude in Lyon when the Convention decrees the destruction of the capital of the Gauls proves.
In the spring of 1794, Couthon and his wife leave their house near Pont-Neuf, close to the baths. They come and stay in the Rue Honoré, in the house of the cabinetmaker Duplay. In the evenings he meets with the Robespierre brothers, Saint-Just, Lebas and a squadron of enthusiast, and they declaim Latin verses singing of the glory of Rome; they shed a tear for the misfortunes of Berenice; and they drink hot chocolate, which makes a change for Couthon from his broth and drops of opium. And then, this whole high society is taken over by that which they call, by understatement, “the force of things.”
He finds that the Exagérés exaggerate and that the Indulgents are too indulgent. He makes no gesture to save Jacques Roux and Camille Desmoulins. He gives the report therefore on the disastrous law of Prairial which abolishes the preliminary interrogation and the defense of the accused. And yet, at the same time that he submits himself to the logic of the force of things, he considers the modalities of the purchase of a manuscript of the Nouvelle Héloïse and thinks of creating a collection of the liliaceae of the Cape of Good Hope. He continues to believe in a kind of more or less supreme god and in the meaning of history. On 9 Thermidor, history catches up with him.
At his death, those who had acclaimed him decide to cross out his name from the vital statistics record, as if he had never existed. In the course of marvelous farandoles, they burn the abhorred cripple’s portraits. Not even seven years old [at his father’s death], Antoine grows up in this deleterious climate. Nevertheless, he lived a full life and honored his father’s memory.
Bernard Chambaz
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estellacat.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-08 11:22 am (UTC)Unfortunatelly, the article does not deal with Couthon's effort to guarantee provisions for his province nor with other positive aspects of his work during the year II.
Hot chocolate...mmm...one of my favourite drinks ;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-08 04:17 pm (UTC)That's part of what I mean when I say it's more literary (for lack of a better word) than the others; Chambaz discusses the sort of things that might be interesting to a novelist rather than the sort of things that might concern a historian. I'm not sure I always like that approach, because it does tend to leave important things out...
Hot chocolate is delicious. And it's one of the few things I like that they know how to make in rural Ohio.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-08 10:15 pm (UTC)I see what you mean by saying that it's more "literary" - it strikes me as more of a brief personality sketch than anything, really. Useful in some regards, lacking in others.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-09 02:25 am (UTC)It's kind of like "Couthon as seen through the experience of Bernard Chambaz", but I don't necessarily mind, since it doesn't really seem to have the pretention to be more.
Качественный блог
Date: 2011-07-10 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-13 02:42 pm (UTC)