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Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just [a] ( French pronunciation: [sɛ̃ʒyst]; 25 August 1767 – 9 Thermidor, Year II [28 July 1794]), sometimes nicknamed the Archangel of Terror, [1] [2] [3] was a French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, a Jacobin club leader, and a major figure of the ...
- Overview
- Early years
- Publication of Esprit de la révolution
- The National Convention
- Legacy
Louis de Saint-Just, (born August 25, 1767, Decize, France—died July 28, 1794, Paris), controversial ideologue of the French Revolution, one of the most zealous advocates of the Reign of Terror (1793–94), who was arrested and guillotined in the Thermidorian Reaction.
Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just was born in central France, the son of a cavalry captain. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy local notary and a woman of egalitarian notions, wished to reduce the nobility to the level of the middle class. The family eventually moved to Blérancourt, a rural town in Picardy, the native province of Louis’s father, who died there in 1777.
After attending the college of the Oratorians in nearby Soissons, he returned to Blérancourt, a small town offering few distractions. In 1785 Saint-Just became attached to the daughter of one of the town’s notaries. Her forced marriage to the son of the other notary in July 1786 marked the beginning of a crisis for Saint-Just. Hurt and angry, he fled to Paris one night in September, taking with him a few family valuables. Lodging near the Palais Royal, then the centre of a brilliant and dissolute society, he soon ran out of money.
His adventure came to a sudden end when his mother, advised of the situation, had him put into a reformatory. He remained there from October 1786 to April 1787. Sobered by his experience, he decided, like so many young men of the middle class, to establish himself and enter upon a career. He became a clerk to the public prosecutor of Soissons, studied at Reims, and took his law degree in April 1788.
France at that time was shaken by the effects of a poor harvest and a hard winter, which coincided with pre-Revolutionary tremors. In 1789 Saint-Just anonymously published his first book, an epic poem, Organt. It was ignored by the public. A long satirical and licentious poem strewn with political allusions, it was reminiscent of Voltaire’s “La Pucelle d’Orléans” (“The Maid of Orleans”), but it lacked the force and spirit needed for public acclaim. Perhaps Saint-Just was trying to set his own mind free rather than to achieve fame. Organt sometimes suggests the misadventures of Saint-Just, with his violent enthusiasms and resentments, but the eroticism is heavy, and few of the themes of his later work appear. Saint-Just’s friends scarcely mentioned it, and his enemies derided it. The book was seized by the authorities in June 1789, and, although it had been issued anonymously, Saint-Just was prudent enough to hide at a friend’s home in Paris.
In the midst of the Revolutionary upheaval, Saint-Just, eager to participate, found himself ignored. Neither a Parisian nor a popular orator nor a leader of men, he was also not inclined to approve of slaughter. He did not speak of the storming of the Bastille, which he had witnessed, until a year later, when his attitude seemed reminiscent of that of the British politician Edmund Burke, who opposed the French Revolution. Saint-Just returned to his hometown at the end of July. The provinces, like Paris, were in full revolt. Militia or national guard units were spontaneously forming everywhere, and Saint-Just became commander of the second unit organized in Blérancourt.
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Though he was driven by ambition, his ambition was to serve the cause of the poor and the peasants, and, if he turned toward Maximilien de Robespierre, the most pitiless of the revolutionaries, it was from conviction. Saint-Just now proposed directing the Revolution beyond benevolent and patriotic activity toward the making of a new society. In 1791 he finally published Esprit de la révolution et de la constitution de France (The Spirit of the Revolution and the Constitution of France). The exposition was bold, vigorous, and lofty. The brief, forceful, and elliptical formulations characterized the author. According to him, the constitution framed by the Assembly was acceptable as a first step, but the French were not yet free. Nor were they sovereign, but sovereignty of the people was acceptable only if the people were just and rational. “Law should yield nothing to opinion and everything to ethics,” Saint-Just maintained. He confided to his publisher that the boldness of his exposition attracted readers and rightly added that his work, because it was based on less extensive reading than he might have wished, had the originality of a solitary thinker.
At that time Saint-Just believed himself to be on the eve of a political career, and his elimination from the Assembly as a result of his age provoked a serious crisis. “I am a slave of my adolescence!” he cried revealingly.
His election to the National Convention in September 1792, shortly after he became 25, finally gave him a task cut to his measure. His first speech, in November 1792, was devoted to arguing that it would be just to put the deposed king, Louis XVI, to death without a trial. "Those who attach any importance to the just punishment of a king will never found a Republic," he insisted. His brilliant oratory and his implacable logic immediately established him as one of the most militant of the Montagnards.
When the Girondins were ousted from the Convention on May 30, 1793, Saint-Just was elected to the Committee of Public Safety. In the fall of that year, he was sent on mission to oversee the army in the critical sector of Alsace. He proved himself a man of decisive action, relentless in demanding results from the generals but sympathetic to the complaints of ordinary soldiers. He repressed local opponents of the Revolution but did not indulge in the mass executions ordered by some of the other deputies on mission.
Upon his return to the Convention, in year II of the French republican calendar (1793–94), Saint-Just was elected president. He persuaded the Convention to pass the radical Ventôse Decrees, under which confiscated lands were supposed to be distributed to needy patriots. These were the most revolutionary acts of the French Revolution, because they expropriated from one class for the benefit of another. He also joined with Robespierre in supporting the execution of the Hébertists and Dantonists.
During the same period, Saint-Just drafted Fragments sur les institutions républicaines, proposals far more radical than the constitutions he had helped to frame; this work laid the theoretical groundwork for a communal and egalitarian society. Sent on mission to the army in Belgium, he contributed to the victory of Fleurus on 8 Messidor, year II (June 26, 1794), which gave France the upper hand against the Austrians. These months were the high point of his career.
But his rise to power had wrought a remarkable change in Saint-Just’s public personality. He became a cold, almost inhuman fanatic, as bloodthirsty as even his “god” Robespierre, a man of many human weaknesses, was not. “The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood,” Saint-Just once declared to the Convention. He, rather than Robespierre, showed himself to be the forerunner of the totalitarian rulers of the 20th century when he said on another occasion,
We must not only punish traitors, but all people who are not enthusiastic. There are only two kinds of citizens: the good and the bad. The Republic owes to the good its protection. To the bad it owes only death.
Saint-Just has, by turns, been lauded as the archangel of the Revolution or abhorred as the terrorist par excellence. Recent scholarly research has made it possible to draw the line between man and myth. Undoubtedly the Revolution changed the unruly, self-indulgent youth into a principled and decisive, though ruthless, leader. To friends he was also kind, helping them in securing positions. Yet it is doubtful whether he had friends in the true sense, for those whom he helped attached themselves to him without becoming his equals.
Many of his contemporaries acknowledged his ability but considered him a monster of pride and cruelty. Others, particularly in later generations, have viewed him as an incorruptible patriot who paid with his life for his allegiance to democracy. Some have seen in him the prototype of the rebel. These contradictions arise in part from Saint-Just’s complex character and in part from an imperfect knowledge of his childhood and adolescence.
- Marcel Reinhard
Jan 19, 2023 · Louis-Antoine-Léon de Saint-Just was born on 25 August 1767 in Decize, a commune in central France. He was the eldest child of Louis-Jean de Saint-Just de Richebourg, a retired cavalry officer, and Marie-Anne Robinot, daughter of a wealthy notary, and had two younger sisters.
- Louis-Antoine-Leon de Saint-Just was a prominent figure of the French Revolution. A leader of the radical Jacobins, he led the push for the executi...
- During the French Revolution, the Ventôse Decrees were a series of proposed reforms that would confiscate land from aristocrats and counter-revolut...
- During the French Revolution, Saint-Just called for the immediate death of King Louis XVI, helped write the democratic Constitution of 1793, wrote...
- Saint-Just was executed because he remained loyal to Robespierre, even as Robespierre's power started to crumble. He was guillotined alongside 20 o...
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Mar 27, 2018 · Learn about the life and legacy of Saint-Just, a young and idealistic leader of the Jacobin Republic who helped unleash the Terror and was executed in 1794. Discover his early struggles, his radical writings, his role in the revolution and his controversial reputation.
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, parfois surnommé l' Archange de la Terreur, né le 25 août 1767 à Decize ( Nivernais, aujourd'hui Nièvre) et mort guillotiné le 10 thermidor an II ( 28 juillet 1794) à Paris, place de la Révolution (actuelle place de la Concorde ), est un homme politique français de la Révolution française.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was born at Decize in the former Nivernais province of central France. He was the eldest child of Louis Jean de Saint-Just de Richebourg (1716–1777), a retired French cavalry officer (and knight of the Order of Saint Louis), [3] and Marie-Anne Robinot (1736–1811), the daughter of a notary . [4]
Louis de Saint-Just, portrait after a red chalk drawing by Christophe Guérin, 1793. Louis de Saint-Just, (born Aug. 25, 1767, Decize, France—died July 28, 1794, Paris), French Revolutionary leader. In support of the French Revolution, he wrote the radical Esprit de la révolution et de la constitution de France (1791) and was elected to the ...
