Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767-1794) was at the core of the radical phase of the French Revolution. His rise to prominence came suddenly in September of 1792, when he was elected the fifth deputy for the departément of Aisne. Within weeks he was delivering thundering speeches before the Assemblée nationale, and by late December he challenged the assembled deputies not to “defer judgment” on the fate of Louis XVI, but rather to vote for his execution.

Very few of his writings survive. The excerpted letter below[*] was sent to Jean-Louis-Marie Villain Daubigny. It reveals Saint-Just’s frustration at being forced to give up his seat in the Legislative Assembly after the elections in the autumn of 1791; Saint-Just was then eleven months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday and therefore too young to sit as a deputy.

What can this letter tell us of Saint-Just the man? What relation exists between his fiery rhetoric in this letter and his later radicalism?
 
 

“A Letter to His Fellow Assemblymen”


July 1792


           I entreat you, my dear friend, to come to the Fête.[1] I implore you. Nevertheless, do not neglect your municipality. I have claimed here the destiny I divine for you: you will one day be a great man of the Republic. As for me, since I came here I have been fired with a republican fever that devours and consumes me....
          It is a disaster that I cannot remain in Paris. I feel within me something which triumphs with the age. Companion of glory and of liberty, preach them in your sections. Let danger be your inspiration. Go to see Desmoulins,[2] embrace him for me, and tell him he will never see me again; that I esteem his patriotism, but that I will scorn him because I have penetrated his soul and he fears that I shall betray him. Tell him not to abandon the good cause, enjoin it on him, for he lacks the courage of a magnanimous virtue.
          Farewell. I am above misfortune. I will endure anything, but I will tell the Truth. You are all despicable, you who have not appreciated me. My palm, for all that, may some day rise and obscure yours! Infamous wretches that you are, I am a cheat, a rascal, because I have no money to give you. Tear out my heart and eat that. You will become what you are not at all: great!
          O God, must Brutus[3] languish forgotten, far from Rome! My resolution is made, however. If Brutus does not kill the others he will kill himself.
 
 

Saint-Just
Notes:

[*] These excerpts appear in Geoffrey Bruun’s Saint-Just: Apostle of Terror (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), 22-23. See the original in the Œuvres complètes de Saint-Just (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1908), vol. 1, 348-349.

[1] By this Saint-Just almost certainly means the Festival of the Revolution, celebrating the 14 July anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.

[2] Camille Desmoulins, journalist, Cordelier, and ultimately the victim of revolutionary forces he sets in motions. See his final letter in Le Vieux Cordelier.

[3] On 15 March, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was assassinated by members of the Roman Senate, chief among whom was Brutus. Brutus earned the scorn of his contemporaries, but he firmly believed he acted in the interest of Rome herself.