The story of the Desmoulins family is one of the beautiful love stories of the French Revolution---and one of the most tragic. He was Camille Desmoulins a struggling Parisian lawyer who stood up on July 12 of 1789 and began a revolution. She was Lucile Duplessis, the sheltered, dreamy daughter of a government official. They were married in 1790, in a wedding attended by major figures of the Revolution ranging from Robespierre and Danton to Herault, Brissot and Petion. Their love story might have seemed a fairytale had it not ended in the deaths of both Lucile and Camille, and the orphaning of their son Horace, not even two years old.
As R.R. Palmer noted in Twelve Who Ruled, "there was Camille Desmoulins, a kind of child in politics, a man known familiarly as Camille in an age when few men were called by their first names, treated by others with an affectionate levity." Camille was brilliant but emotionally unstable, egotistical but always in need of a parent figure such as Mirabeau, Danton or Robespierre (although the latter two were hardly older than himself). He gave the impression of being very immature for a man in his thirties, a fact that Robespierre took full advantage of when defending Camille, (which he did all the time) describing his friend as "a spoiled child." Camille was an exceptionally brilliant journalist, but not a very effective speaker due to his stammer and not a very efficient deputy due to his irresponsibility. Camille could be nasty, vindictive, and vicious, despite the beauty and poignancy of his latter prose in favor of clemency, in the early days of the Revolution he had been known as "The Lantern Lawyer" for his advocacy of hanging aristocrats on the light posts. Rumors persist that he was bisexual and that, despite his love for his wife, he was promiscuous. At the least, he was somewhat confused and erratic as a personality, but nevertheless, charming, witty and idealistic as Marjorie Coryn describes him in The Incorruptible
He still had the charming violences of youth, its blazing enthusiasms, its beautiful faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity. Goodness, not virtue-there was a difference. He still, with feverish excitement, discovered new ideas that were as old as history-he still made boyish experiments with gunpowder and fire still threw snowballs after solemn-faced adults. His own face, there in her lap, with the luminous eagerness of its dark eyes, the mischievous quirk of its supple mouth, the nose that looked too beakily strong for the boyish leanness of the cheeks. Camille the lovely, clever, silly dear that he was-not thinking that gunpowder burns the fingers that meddle with it, not realising that snowballs sometimes sting, and that grownups were often as solemn of mind as of face
Two days pass, and the bawling of Robespierre's godchild would be driving her out of her mind; scattering orders about the sending after of fresh eggs and salad, she would charge back to the rue des Cordeliers, worrying all the way about missing her music lessons and whether her husband has left her. You look a complete wreck, she would say to him crossly; what have you been eating, whoever have you been sleeping with? Then for a week it will be parties and staying up all night; the baby departs to grandmother, nurse scuttling after.
Lucile Dupleissis, born in 1770, was dreamy as a girl, kept a diary wherein she fantasized about having an exciting life and was well-educated for a woman of her time. Some have depicted Lucile as immature and weak like her husband (In Piercy's City of Darkness, City of Light they are described as "hardly older than their little son") and sometimes as a strong and passionate woman. (In Danton's Death she runs down the street yelling "Vive le Roi!" after her husband is killed just to get executed with him). Given her bravery in facing death, I would go for the latter. Despite these varying descriptions of her character, no one has ever denied that she was charming, beautiful and flirtatious (a behavior which caused rumors that she was the lover of, among others, the royalist Irish general Arthur Dillon, the polished CPS member Herault d'Seychelles, the deputy Stanislas Freron, and Danton himself) Hilary Mantel, who in A Place of GGreater Safety best captures this passionate and yet frivolous woman, describes Lucile in the following manner:
After a day poring over her Rousseau she would announce a scheme for a bucolic retirement from the capital, and drive into the country with her infant, screaming at being separated from his grandmother; there she would formulate plans for his education. Her hair streaming down her back and a large straw hat on her head, she would do a little dilettante weeding in the herb beds, by way of getting close to nature; she would read poetry in the afternoon, in a garden swing under an apple tree, and go to bed at nine o'clock.
After graduating from Louis-le-Grand, Camille attempted to start a law practice but failed and moved to Paris where he lived a bohemian life style and became a close friend of a fellow lawyer named George D'Anton. He also met and presumably fell in love with Annette Duplessis, the beautiful older wife of Claude Duplessis, a Treasury official. Annette allowed Camille to tutor her two daughters, Adele and Lucile. Camille and Lucile soon fell in love but were forbidden to marry by Lucile's father who had some major problems with Camille's.....ummm....life style. On July 12th, Camille stood on a chair outside the Café du Foy and announced that Necker had been sacked and that the citizens should arm themselves. Two days later, the Bastille fell. After this, Camille's career was made. He began a highly successful publishing career and, well, was well-compensated for his services to various figures. (Tanith Lee's Marat puts it this way "Robespierre the Incorruptible, Danton the Corrupted, Mirabeau the Corrupter and Camille who's too stupid to know when he's been offered a bribe"). He married Lucile, (who wept tears of joys when her father finally relented) in a ceremony witnessed by around 50 of the major figures of the Revolution. In less than four years, all those who had been at the ceremony would be dead, jailed or had left the country. Robespierre was the best man and took off Lucile's garter. Robespierre also was the godfather of the Desmoulins' son Horace and was for a time engaged to Adele.
At first Robespierre defended him, but this became increasingly difficult after Robespierre proposed burning #3 of the Vieux Cordelier to the Jacobins Club and Desmoulins said "Burning is not answering"-....the same answer Robespierre's hero Rousseau had made to an archbishop who had proposed burning some of his work. Pushed by Saint-Just, Collot and Billaud, Robespierre signed Camille's death warrant and Desmoulins went to trial along with Danton. This did not stop him from being impertinent. Asked for his age by the Tribunal, he answered "Thirty-three...the same age as that good sans-culotte Jesus" (He lied actually, he was 34). He told Fouquier-Tinville, his own cousin who he had got the job of Public Prosecutor a year earlier, that he "regretted his nepotism." But this arrogance was more of a show than anything else. Camille collapsed when he heard that Lucile, who stood outside the prison everyday so that he could see her, was to be arrested on trumped-up charges of leading a prison revolt. "They're going to kill my wife!" He screamed, reflecting in his letters that "I wanted to make a republic the whole world would adore. I never thought that men could be so ferocious and so unjust." He was panicking in the tumbrel, despite Herault and Danton's best efforts to calm him. He calmed as he mounted the scaffold and gave something to Sanson, telling him to give it to Annette. It was a lock of Lucile's hair, which he had kept in a locket around his neck. Then, on 16 Germinal Year II, Camille Desmoulins was executed.
Lucile had not much time to live either. Arrested for supposedly exciting a prison revolt to free her husband and Danton, she told the Tribunal that she was happy for death for "you send me to my husband." In prison, Lucile made friends with Francoise Hébert, wife of a man her husband had helped to condemn to death. Statuesquely beautiful in white, Lucile was compared to a bride as she mounted the scaffold. At 23, she too followed her husband to the grave. Little Horace, orphaned by his godfather, was raised by Annette and Adele. Annette, in grief, wrote Robespierre asking why he didn't "take myself and Adele too....bury our bodies in the same grave." Horace attended Louis-le-Grand like his father, moved to Haiti and died at age 33, ending one of the most tragic stories of the Revolution.
Camille Desmoulins was born in Guise, Picardy on March 2, 1760, the eldest of six children of Jean-Louis and Madeleine Desmoulins. Precocious and mischievous, Camille was sent on a scholarship at age ten to Louis-le-Grand in Paris, an exclusive and prestigious school mainly attended by aristocrats, where he met a grave, gentle boy two years older than himself by the name of Maximilien de Robespierre. The two became close friends, a friendship that lasted for over twenty years until Robespierre signed Camille's death warrant. (It was rumored that Robespierre came to Camille's prison cell telling him that he could release him if he would be a witness for the prosecution---Camille refused) Camille, Maxime, Jerome Petion, Stanislaus Freron, among others, became part of a circle that read Plutarch and Rousseau and dreamed of saving France.
But despite his strong ties to Robespierre, Camille gradually started becoming closer to Danton. Although he himself had written the charges against them, the execution of his former friends the Girondins deeply upset him. Supposedly he fainted in the court room and was heard to remark, in tears, "They were my friends...and I killed them!"By late 1793, Camille was publically calling for clemency in his newspaper The Vieux Cordelier, declaring "I will die of the opinion that to make France flourishing, republican and happy a little ink would have sufficed and only one guillotine."
Fictional Representations
Films
Napoleon (1927)
Camille and Lucile are seen briefly in this film at the Cordeliers Club where Camille is working as Danton's secretary and Lucile is helping him. One of my friends has said that Camille looks like a "foppish vampire"...and I really can't help but agree with her.
Danton (1921)
Camille marries Lucile to save her from the guillotine (she's an aristo) but Lucile falls in love with Danton. I'm not sure why....Emil Janning's Danton is well...erm...yes....and Camille is kinda cute in a way--he plays the guitar (hippie rocker Camille!) and he's actually pretty accurate...I mean, more so than in LA REVOLUTION FRANCAISE. At least in this version, he's always frightened or fainting when he's not being manic, cheery and musical.
Danton (1982)(see picture on far right)
Camille (Patrice Chereau) as portrayed in this film is the best I've seen in that he is childish, intense, by turns courageous and weak and tends to take rather self-destructive measures. Lucile (Angela Winkler)is the good, emotional, devoted wife. And you've got to love Horace crying as soon as Robespierre starts knocking on the door :)
La Revolution Francaise (1989)(see left)
Camille is very flatteringly portrayed in this film. He's very nice and very stable. He plays Robespierre and Danton's good angel. That's why I say that the depiction in Danton is better. Lucile is pretty good in this film....but little Horace grows up way too fast.
Jefferson in Paris (1994)Camille appears briefly to spark the fall of the Bastille.
