ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien de (1758-1794) and SAINT-JUST, Louis-Antoine (1767-1794). French Revolutionary Leaders.
Document Signed ("Robespierre" "St Just"), as members of the notorious Committee of Public Safety of the Convention Nationale, ordering the arrest and transfer to the Conciergerie of Barnet, clerk to Citizen Mérat of Orleans, Vitry the younger, Dupont and
The document orders the Minister of Justice to arrest the four men immediately and "to report the following day on the execution of this order . . ." In form this is a document issued to give effect to a decison of the Committee. Decisions were originally entered in a register, and then a document with the appropriate instructions, which had to be signed by at least three members of the Committee, was sent to the relevant department.
Of the six signatories to this document only one, Hérault de Séchelles, was not a revolutionary extremist. A lawyer with aristocratic connections, Hérault eventually went to the guillotine in April 1794, together with his ally Danton. Collot d'Herbois, a flamboyant former actor, was responsible for an orgy of blood-letting and destruction in Lyons (a city where he had once been booed off the stage) in reprisal for an anti-revolutionary insurrection. He and his close friend Billaud-Varenne were transported to Guyana after the fall of Robespierre.
But it is Robespierre, the "Incorruptible" and Saint-Just, his glamorous and ruthless acolyte, who hold centre stage. The cold and fastidious Robespierre was the architect of the Terror, but a contemporary Memoir from the Revolutionary period records that "[one] could almost say that Saint-Just played a greater part than Robespierre himself. Although one of the youngest members of the Convention, Saint-Just was perhaps the one who combined the most exalted enthusiasm, the quickest and surest perception, the most stubborn will and the most organised mind . . . if the personal views of the one had to give way to the other [between Robespierre and Saint-Just] it is certain that it was never Saint-Just who gave way." Both men went to the guillotine on 28 July 1794.
We have been unable to discover either the "crimes" or the ultimate fate of the men named in this document. They were originally meant to have been taken to another prison, l'Abbaye, but this has been crossed out and "la Conciergerie" inserted. The most famous inmate of the Conciergerie at the time was Marie Antoinette. Three days after the signing of this document she was to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Two days later, on 16 October, she left the Conciergerie to be taken by open tumbril to the guillotine.
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