"I love you more than ever and until death": Robespierre's letter to Danton tells part of the history of France

Loris Chavanette is the author, in particular, of

Quatre-vingt-quinze.

The Terror on Trial

.

The shock of the Revolution

Napoleon.

Between eternity, the ocean and the night.

Correspondence

This story has been told over and over again.

The greatest pens of French literature have rubbed shoulders with it with more or less success, more or less genius.

Chateaubriand, Michelet, Lamartine, Dumas, Hugo, Anatole France, Romain Rolland sought to paint the tragedy of the Danton/Robespierre couple, as if, at the same time as everything separated them, everything should finally unite them in the memory of men.

Once again, this story resurfaces and persists in probing us.

Indeed, Sunday March 12, in Versailles, in the city which saw the French Revolution being born with brilliance, will be auctioned a letter addressed by Robespierre to Danton.

It's the only one we have, which makes it all worth it.

The Gazette de Drouot estimated it between 100,000 and 200,000 euros.

This manuscript signed by the hand of Robespierre tells a part of their story.

It was previously exhibited under glass at the Museum of Manuscripts in Paris, but the closure of the latter brings out this archival treasure, which logically deserves its place in a national museum or the French archives.

But nobody talks about it, nobody rushes to have this republican relic acquired by the French state.

She would, however, go well with the future Robespierre museum that the Société des Études Robespierristes is about to open in Arras, the birthplace of the “Incorruptible”, a place already dedicated to his memory and that some now wish to dedicate to his glory.

We remember the energy deployed by researchers in order to have the State pre-empt, in 2000, several manuscripts by Robespierre,

including drafts of his speeches.

A commendable undertaking, but why isn't it renewed today with this letter put up for auction in absolute silence, and which is therefore very likely to leave the soil of France if a foreign collector puts a million on the table?

Would this letter get in the way by any chance?

So let's talk about what it contains.

With Danton in government and Robespierre as an influential orator in the Assembly and the Jacobins, the Revolution was well guarded in Paris.

Loris Chavanette

Following the capture of the Château des Tuileries on August 10, 1792, Robespierre and Danton were the first two elected from Paris to the National Convention.

Louis XVI overthrown, the monarchy is abolished and the Republic proclaimed.

Danton is then the strong man of the regime and even the providential savior of the Republic because, by having decreed the country in danger as well as by having laid the first milestones of the Terror in Paris (we know his formula: "Let's

), his energy made it possible to repel the Austro-Prussian invader.

This earned him a seat on the Committee of Public Safety and immense popularity throughout the country.

He is the man of audacity.

With him in government and Robespierre as an influential orator in the Assembly and at the Jacobins, the Revolution was well guarded in Paris.

But Danton is increasingly suspected of corruption.

This made him want to take to the open sea: on several occasions at the beginning of 1793, he went on a mission to Belgium with the military command to lead the war as close as possible to danger.

It was at this time that Robespierre took up the pen to write to him.

Danton was still in Belgium when his wife died in Paris on February 10, giving birth to a fourth child, stillborn.

Back from his mission, the colossus learns the terrible news: his Gabrielle is no more, his son never was.

The strong man collapses, he suffers, steps back for a moment from the political world to take the direction of the cemetery where he has the vault opened and kisses his Gabrielle one last time to say goodbye with his lips.

The widower's grief is violent, but at that moment, a man turns to him for support: Robespierre himself.

We are on February 15, 1793.

This letter therefore recounts these friendships that crack before breaking in the name of politics, the terrain of violent struggles.

Loris Chavanette

In order to send her his condolences, the latter wrote her a letter to the compassionate beauty.

Nothing testifies better to the deep tenderness he has for the bereaved tribune than these words:

These are the words of a friend who never forgets, not even at this moment, the political struggle to be waged.

No doubt Robespierre was sincere, but he took the opportunity to make an ally.

Politics, always politics, again politics, is his whole life.

There is no other, and certainly not a woman to cry.

Danton will remarry (very quickly even) and will give up his seat on the committees to Robespierre, while the latter will sink ever deeper into the bitterness of the political struggle by investing the Republic with the ideal of virtue, which he erected into ideology, and even into God.

This same virtue will make him send to the scaffold his best enemy to whom he had said, with a tearful heart, that he would love him

.

By the kiss of the guillotine, this promise was kept, since Robespierre ascended the scaffold only three months after Danton and Desmoulins, the other friend, this one from childhood, whom he loved so much and so well that he he, too, had ended up handing him over to the executioner.

This letter therefore recounts these friendships that crack before breaking in the name of politics, the terrain of violent struggles.

It conceals a part of the French exception: the propensity to fratricide, which is also called civil war.