A scholarship boy from Guise
Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoît Desmoulins was born on 2 March 1760 at Guise, in Picardy, the son of a local magistrate with more standing than money. A scholarship took him to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where one of the other pupils was Maximilien RobespierreFigure: Maximilien Robespierre. The Incorruptible who defended the Terror and died by it, two years his senior.
He qualified as a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris in 1785, but a stammer made him a poor pleader, and briefs were few. On the eve of the Revolution he was nearly thirty, poor, clever, and waiting for something to happen.
The table at the Palais-Royal
Sunday, 12 July 1789
On 11 July 1789 Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy dismissed his popular finance minister Necker, while troops gathered around Paris. When the news reached the city the next day, crowds filled the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Outside the Café de Foy, Desmoulins climbed onto a table and, by his own account pistol in hand, told them the dismissal was the signal for a massacre of patriots and that they must take up arms.
For a rallying sign he pulled leaves from the garden's trees and pinned one to his hat as a green cockade; hundreds copied him. That afternoon crowds marched through the streets with busts of Necker and the Duke of Orléans taken from Curtius's wax museum. Two days later the Bastille fell, and the unknown lawyer was famous.
A journalist of the Revolution
In the months that followed he wrote pamphlets, among them La France libre and the Discours de la lanterne aux Parisiens, and in November 1789 he launched a weekly, Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant. Witty, cruel and widely read, it ran until the summer of 1791. With DantonFigure: Georges Danton. The orator who called for audacity, then for mercy and Marat he was one of the leading voices of the Cordeliers Club, the most radical in Paris.
In December 1790 he married Lucile Duplessis at Saint-Sulpice; Robespierre was among the witnesses, and their son Horace was born in 1792. After the fall of the monarchy in August 1792 Danton, now Minister of Justice, made him his secretary-general, and in September Paris elected him to the National Convention. He sat with the Montagnards, voted for the king's death, and in 1793 wrote the Histoire des Brissotins, an attack that helped bring down the GirondinsGroup: Girondins. The deputies who took France to war and lost Paris to the Mountain.
Le Vieux Cordelier
A plea for clemency in the middle of the Terror
On 5 December 1793, with Danton's encouragement, he brought out the first issue of a new paper, Le Vieux Cordelier. It began by attacking the ultra-revolutionaries around Hébert, then went further. The third issue, retelling Tacitus on the treason trials of the Roman emperors, read as a portrait of the Law of SuspectsDocument: Law of Suspects. The law that filled the prisons of the Terror; the fourth proposed a committee of clemency to release the innocent.
Robespierre shielded his old schoolfellow at first, but at the Jacobin ClubGroup: Jacobin Club. The Paris club at the heart of the radical Revolution he proposed that the offending issues be burned.
“Burning is not answering.”
Arrest and death
Once the Hébertists had been guillotined on 24 March 1794, the Committees turned on the moderates. Desmoulins was arrested with Danton on the night of 30 to 31 March and tried with him before the Revolutionary Tribunal from 2 April; when the accused began to sway the room, the Convention passed a decree that let the court exclude them from the proceedings. On 5 April 1794 he was guillotined on the Place de la Révolution, aged thirty-four.
Lucile, accused of plotting in the prisons to free him, followed him to the scaffold on 13 April. Their son Horace, not yet two, was brought up by her mother.
