Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

A restless youth

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was born on 25 August 1767 at Decize, on the Loire in the Nivernais, the only son of a career cavalry officer. In 1776 the family settled at Blérancourt, a small town near Soissons, and his father died there the next year. He was schooled by the Oratorian fathers at Soissons and grew into a proud, restless young man. In 1786 he ran off to Paris with some of the family silver, and his mother had him shut up for several months in a house of correction.

He then studied law at Reims, where he took his degree in 1788. In 1789 he published Organt, a long and licentious mock-epic poem in twenty cantos, which made little stir.

From Blérancourt to Paris

The Revolution gave him a stage. He made himself the voice of Blérancourt's patriots, and in August 1790 he wrote to Robespierre, then a deputy in the National Assembly, to ask for his help in a local cause, addressing him as the man “whom I know only, as I know God, by his wonders”. It was the beginning of the closest partnership of the Revolution. In 1791 he published a book, L'Esprit de la Révolution et de la Constitution de France, but the law kept him out of the new Legislative Assembly: deputies had to be twenty-five.

In September 1792, just past that age, the department of the Aisne elected him to the National Convention. He was its youngest member. In Paris he joined the Jacobin Club and took his place among the Mountain, around Robespierre.

“One cannot reign innocently”

On 13 November 1792 he gave his first speech, in the debate on whether the deposed king could be tried. Most deputies were arguing over the law: whether Louis's constitutional inviolability still protected him, and which court could judge him. Saint-Just brushed all of it aside. The king was not a citizen to be tried but an enemy to be fought, and the only question was whether he should reign or die. “One cannot reign innocently,” he said, as the speech was reported: every king was a rebel and a usurper.

The speech made his name overnight, and its argument, taken up by Robespierre, became the Mountain's. In January 1793 Saint-Just voted for death, against an appeal to the people and against a reprieve, and the king went to the guillotine on 21 January.

On the Committee

On 30 May 1793, days before the fall of the Girondins, the Convention added him to the Committee of Public Safety, and he kept his seat when it was renewed in July. Robespierre joined it later that month, and with Couthon the three formed its closest circle, which their enemies would call the triumvirate. Saint-Just became one of its rapporteurs, the members who explained its policy to the Convention, and his reports read like verdicts.

In July he reported on the Girondin deputies under arrest. On 10 October he had the Convention declare that “the provisional government of France is revolutionary until the peace”, putting off the new constitution until the war was won and giving the Committee a free hand for the Terror.

With the armies

Strasbourg, Landau, Fleurus

The Committee sent him where the war was going badly. In October 1793, with his friend Philippe Le Bas, he went as a representative on mission to the Army of the Rhine, which had been driven back on Strasbourg. The two ruled the city by decree: negligent officers were arrested or shot, the rich were made to pay a forced loan, and the city's aristocrats were ordered to hand over their shoes to barefoot soldiers. They also had Euloge Schneider, the brutal public prosecutor of the region, arrested and sent to Paris. By the end of December the armies of Hoche and Pichegru had relieved the besieged fortress of Landau.

In the spring of 1794 he went to the Army of the North, on the Belgian frontier. He stayed with the troops through repeated failed crossings of the Sambre, and was with Jourdan's army when it took Charleroi and, on 26 June, won the battle of Fleurus, which opened Belgium to the French.

Against the factions

Back in Paris in February 1794, he was elected president of the Convention and brought in the Ventôse decrees, which were to take the property of the Revolution's convicted enemies and give it to poor patriots. They were hardly ever carried out, but his report on them gave the Revolution one of its most famous lines.

The same month he turned the Committee's weapon on the Revolution's own factions. On 13 March he read a report on the “factions of the foreigner”; that night Hébert and the leaders of the Cordeliers were arrested, and they were guillotined on 24 March. On 31 March, hours after Danton and Camille Desmoulins were arrested, he read the report against them, drawn in part from notes Robespierre had given him. When Danton's defence began to sway the courtroom, Saint-Just had the Convention pass a decree allowing the tribunal to shut out any accused who insulted justice.

9 Thermidor

The speech he never finished

By the summer the Committee was split. Saint-Just tried to reconcile its members with Robespierre, and on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) he rose in the Convention to read a report he had promised to show his colleagues first, and had not. “I belong to no faction; I will fight them all,” he began. Tallien cut him off after a few sentences, and through the uproar that followed Saint-Just stood silent at the rostrum while Robespierre was brought down. He was arrested with him, freed by the Paris Commune, and taken again in the early hours at the Hôtel de Ville, where Le Bas shot himself.

On the evening of 28 July he was guillotined with Robespierre and Couthon on the Place de la Révolution. He was twenty-six. The men of Thermidor made him, beside Robespierre, the face of the Terror, and later writers called him its archangel: young, handsome and pitiless. His unfinished notes on republican institutions, published after his death, sketch the austere republic of virtue he had hoped the Terror would make possible.