Camille Desmoulins (2 March 1760 – 5 April 1794) was a politician of the French Republic and a friend of Georges Danton, a moderate leader during the Reign of Terror in the 1792. On 12 July 1789, Desmoulins urged the people of Paris to take up arms and wear cockades by which they would know each other, virtually founding the French Revolution.
Biography[]
Camille Desmoulins was born on 2 March 1760 in Guisne, Picardy, in northern France. Elected to the parlement of Paris in 1785, he was later sidetracked from this career due to a severe stammer and a ferocious temper. He became a political journalist due to his interest in public affairs and once wrote a newspaper for the French politician Honore Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau, but he later failed in his attempt to become a lawyer. Until the start of the French Revolution, Desmoulins seemed to be stuck as a small-time writer.
However, on 12 July 1789 Desmoulins had his breakthrough moment. When news arrived that the treasurer Jacques Necker was dismissed by King Louis XVI of France, the people were incredibly upset. In the Palais Royal café of Café du Foy, he stood on the table and his stammer broke. He made a huge speech urging the crowd to take up arms and adopt cockades by which they could know each other, and he founded the revolutionary movement. Two days later, the storming of the Bastille took place.
French Revolution[]
From November 1789 to July 1791, Desmoulins ran a hypercritical journal that made him notorious, and he left behind his life of poverty to become a famous journalist. His newspaper was pro-revolutionary and anti-royalist, and his relationship with the royalist politician Mirabeau suffered afterwards. Comte Pierre Victor de Malouet went so far as to ask the government to declare Desmoulins insane. When Mirabeau died in April 1791, Desmoulins claimed that he was the "god of orators, thieves, and liars" in counter to many positive eulogies of him.
Desmoulins on the execution cart, 5 April 1794
In 1792, he became enemies with Girondist leader Jacques Pierre Brissot after a legal case began a dispute between them, and Desmoulins criticized him in pamphlets. He went way too far, and his publications led to the purge of the Girondists by French leader Maximilien Robespierre. Desmoulins regretted his role in the executions of the Girondists, and collapsed in court when the death sentence against them was pronounced. Desmoulins later stopped his support of Robespierre and instead was aligned fully with Georges Danton, a moderate politician who came to oppose Robespierre.
In December 1793, Robespierre was angered at Desmoulins when he made offensive papers against him and the Jacobin Club, but offered to simply burn his papers rather than punish him. Desmoulins quoted Jean-Jacques Rousseau by saying "Burning is not answering", and Robespierre called him a spoiled child after he repeatedly refused the generous terms. After the March 1794 executions of Jacques Hebert's followers, the Jacobins decided to purge Danton and his friends.
Execution[]
Danton and his friends on the execution cart.
Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Marie Jean Herault de Sechelles, Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine, Pierre Philippeaux, and many other Dantonists were sentenced to be executed on 5 April 1794. When he found out that his wife was also sentenced to death, he tried to fight the guards; as a result, they had to force him onto the tumbrel cart. While being taken to the guillotine, he struggled and pleaded to the crowd, with his shirt being ripped open. Desmoulins was the third Dantonist to be executed by guillotine that day, and his wife was killed eight days later.