Quotes By and About Saint-Just
Thanks to Morgan for some of these quotes.
Saint-Just's Description
Saint-Just's Ideals
Saint-Just and Robespierre
"Entertaining" Quotes
Miscellaneous
Saint-Just's Description
"I am twenty years old; I have done badly; I will
be able to do better."
-Saint-Just, from the introduction of his satirical poem Organt
"Saint-Just. Ice-blond and an ice-blond heart."
-Tanith Lee, The Gods Are Thirsty
"He was beautiful, Saint-Just, with his pensive face on which one
saw the largest energy tempered by an air of indefinable softness."
-David d'Angers
"They saw a very young and exceedingly handsome man, with a pale,
oval face, brilliant blue eyes, and brown hair well tended. His
white skin and the care with which he was dressed suggested an aristocrat,
as did also a certain disdainful haughtiness in his manner. His
blue coat with gold buttons fitted him to perfection and showed
off his slender height... His mouth was sensitive, small and somewhat
feminine."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"Never voicing his own opinions or private interests, insisting
that he belonged to no faction, he could be counted on, he proclaimed,
to represent only the people's will."
-Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions
"...Camille felt an instant aversion, as to the touch of ice, which
is what the young man most resembled. Chiseled from an ice floe.
Was there blood in there anywhere? And Saint-Just himself: you could
tell he hadn't liked the familiar embrace between two men who had
shared together their years at school. Climbing, then. Today, friend
of the leader of the Jacobins, tomorrow the world."
-Tanith Lee, The Gods Are Thirsty
"The life of Saint-Just was a duet between a flute and a blade."
-Ian Finlay Hamilton
"God almighty, we must look like [Robespierre's] bad angel and his
good: black hair, scowling, and ugly one side; blond and gorgeous
as some girl the other. The hair shivered with iridescence on the
shoulders of Saint-Just's smart coat, and in both of his ears rings
flamed a silvery gold. The buckles of his shoes blinded you. His
cravat blinded you, so white, white as Robespierre's own, but far
more complex in its knot. Perhaps Saint-Just's cravat would choke
him."
-Camille Desmouslins in Tanith Lee's The Gods Are Thirsty
"Louis de Saint-Just, a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable,
clever young man... spoke for many of them when, his long fair hair
dancing on his shoulders, he demanded the trial and execution of
the King as an enemy of the people."
-Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution
"Saint-Just was morbidly fascinated with his own death, which he
viewed as the natural and logical outcome of his own insufficiency--
that is, his inability to wipe out all dissent and stamp out all
'evil' in the world."
-Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions
"He is unusually handsome, with fascinating, but deeply repellent,
overly perfect good looks... black riding clothes... high riding
boots, covered with mud, on his nonchalantly crossed legs; over-long
black hair, not powdered today; deep, cloudy black eyes; black beard
growing on the delicate face of an archangel; forehead provocatively
white, as are the hands..."
-Stanislawa Przybyszewska, Thermidor
"He was not only an orator but an organiser and an administrator;
and a poet and a man of action; a realist and a dreamer."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"Saint-Just is almost as eager as I am to get back to Paris. I've
promised him one of your dinners. I'm delighted you've no ill-feeling
for him. He's an excellent fellow. Every day I love and admire him
more. The Republic has no more ardent or intelligent champion. Between
us there's been complete agreement, perfect harmony. And what endears
him still more to me is that he often talks to me about you, and
does all he can to cheer me up. I think he values our friendship
very highly, and every now and then he says the kindest things to
me."
-Philippe Le Bas in a letter to his wife
"One day you had nothing but kindly thoughts of him, the next you
found yourself compelled to loathe him."
-Augustin Lejeune
"His face has the stiffness and intolerant pride of a man who has
reformed himself, and is atoning for a youthful error by a life
of virtue."
-Charles Nodier
"...I'm concerned about his icy rapture."
-Maximilien Robespierre in the Rose of Versailles anime
"He was a slender, elegant young man with the face of an Antinous
under a cluster of golden hair. His eyes were large, liquid and
tender, but as they looked upon André-Louis, who sat unmoved, the
lines of the handsome face were stern. It was Saint-Just."
-Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche the Kingmaker
". . . a blond, frail man of twenty-five, jaundiced
in complexion yet not unhandsome, his expression high, disdainful.
. . that obscure, stern fellow with the large head, prominent straight
nose and eyebrows, masterful chin and peering keen glance. . . ."
-John Mills Whitham
"This young man is one of the mysterious of the
Revolution. He shot briefly across it, his time of prominence lasting
less than two years, a flaming personality whose youth had been
anything but promising, but whose mature years, had he lived to
attain them, might conceivably have rocked the world."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
"Against [Collot] in the Committee was pitted
an extremely dangerous adversary, the boyish and too beautiful Saint-Just,
the regenerator of armies, the man of emergencies and twin pillar
of the absent Robespierre."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
"Saint-Just was a specialized machine of revolutionary
precision."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
"On the other side, Antoine-Louis-Léon
Florelle de Saint-Just, pale, low forehead, regular profile, mysterious
eyes, deep sadness, twenty-three years old."
-Victor Hugo, 93
"In the Convention he spoke only under the most
significant circumstances, in the club of the Jacobins almost never,
in his personal life just what was necessary."
-Korngold
"At first glance, one could almost mistake you
for a human being."
-Charles D'Aubigny in the movie The Reign of Terror
*New* "Every other member of the convention was older than he was, yet he dominated most of them easily."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
*New* "Tense, alert, seemingly unruffled; cold and superior in manner, sometimes purposely enigmatic; affecting to be unmoved by the feelings that governed others, he behaved like one who thought himself above humanity, and made his admirers feel in the presence of a demigod."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
*New* "Saint-Just was an idea energized by a passion. All that was abstract, absolute and ideological in the Revolution, was embodied in his slender figure and written on his youthful face."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
*New* "He was no lover of blood, as Collot d'Herbois seems to have become. Blood to him simply did not matter. The individual was irrelevant to his picture of the world. The hot temper of his adolescence now blazed beneath the calm exterior of the political fanatic."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
Saint-Just's Ideals
"Those who would make revolutions in the world, those
who want to do good in this world must sleep only in the tomb."
-Saint-Just
"Between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common
but the sword; we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed
by justice; we must oppress the tyrant..."
-Saint-Just
"...out of all his wide reading on many subjects, that which remained
the core of his doctrine to the end was the beautiful fallacy that
equality will follow political liberty, and justice accompany equality,
so that all men will then be happy."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"The weeds... cut away. Louis Antoine, don't you see, those weeds
are living men and women? No. It's only the glory of the great alter
of perfection in the colossal cathedral of eternity you see.
(Yet which of them, actually, has unimpaired vision?)"
-Tanith Lee, The Gods Are Thirsty
"Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois insinuated that there must
be no mention of the Supreme Being, of the immortality of the soul
or of wisdom. They had turned against these ideas finding them indiscreet.
They blushed at the thought of the Divinity... So, I was not to
speak to you of Providence, the only hope of man in his loneliness
of spirit, when, hedged in by sophistries, he asks of heaven the
courage and the wisdom necessary for the triumph of the truth."
-Saint-Just, in his last speech
"...he pleaded the cause of the peasants, not because he cared for
popularity or personal success, and not, primarily, because he wanted
to keep them quiet and to avoid disorder. He pleaded their cause
because he was aflame with a sense of the injustice they had suffered,
and because it was his conviction that only upon a happy and independent
peasantry, protected by sound laws, could the Revolution be permanently
established."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"What constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything
that stands in opposition to it."
-Saint-Just
"When principles fail, men have only one way to save them and to
preserve their faith, which is to die for them. In the searing heat
of Paris in July, Saint-Just, ostensibly rejecting reality and the
world, confesses that he stakes his life on the decision of principles...
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die-- and to die for
an impossible love which is the contrary of love. Saint-Just dies,
and with him all hope of a new religion."
-Albert Camus
"I contemn the dust of which I am made, this dust that speaks to
you now. It can be persecuted, it can be brought to death. But I
challenge the world to take from me that part of me which will live
through the centuries and survive in the skies."
-Saint-Just
"There's not a single human being that I trust."
-Saint-Just in the anime Rose of Versailles
"[Saint-Just's] fault-- if it be a fault-- was to believe in his
political theory against all the evidence of his senses, until his
heart was finally broken."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"Had all been humble, and had nobody been jealous because more fuss
was made of somebody else than of himself, we should now be at peace
among ourselves."
-Saint-Just
"Au nom de la Convention; elle est partout où nous sommes!"
("In the name of the Convention; it is wherever we are!")
-Saint-Just
"Some day men will be astonished that in the
eighteenth century humanity was less advanced than in the time of
Caesar. Then, a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate, with
no formality but thirty dagger blows, with no law but the liberty
of Rome. And today, respectfually, we conduct a trial for a man
who was the assassin of a people, taken in flagrante, his
hand soaked with blood, his hand plunged in crime."
-Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, speech calling for the king's execution
"Citizens, the tribunal which ought to judge
Louis is not a judiciary tribunal: it is a council; it is the people;
it is you."
-Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, speech calling for the king's execution
"Happiness is a new idea in Europe."
-Saint-Just
"[M]en were to declare their friends in the temples,
fight beside them in war, be buried with them in the same tombs;
and those who did not believe in friendship were to be banished."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
"Strike quick and strike hard. Dare--
that is the secret of success in revolutions."
-Saint-Just to Robespierre, according to Thomas E. Watson, The
Story of France vol. 2
*New* "God, protector of innocence and virtue, since you have led me among evil men it is surely to unmask them!"
-Saint-Just
*New* "I think I may say that most political errors come from regarding legislation as a difficult science."
*New* "Long laws are public calamities."
Saint-Just and Robespierre
"All I know is that I'd die for you."
-Saint-Just to Robespierre in Pam Gems' The Snow Palace
"You who sustain the vacillating country against the torrent of
of despotism and intrigue, you whom I know as I know God by your
miracles, I address myself to you, monsieur, to beg you to join
with me in saving my poor region. I don't know you but you are a
great man. You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are
the representative of humanity and the republic."
-Saint-Just, in his first letter to Robespierre
"It was as though [Robespierre's] own ideal of himself had suddenly
risen up before him, terrible and beautiful in impossible perfection."
-Marjorie Coryn, The Incorruptible
"...[Robespierre] always liked flowers. Saint-Just used to bring
him roses by the armful, like a young bride."
-Tanith Lee, The Gods Are Thirsty
"You have been thinking and still are thinking of yourself. But
I am thinking-- about you too. And so I have no interest in myself.
I am too occupied with trying to find you again."
-Saint-Just to Robespierre in Stanislawa Przybyszewska's Thermidor
"Us-- means you and I; exclusively and unreservedly. And so it will
remain. In spite of everything."
-Robespierre to Saint-Just in Stanislawa Przybyszewska's Thermidor
"There's nothing sexual between them. Danton would tell you, Robespierre
he never-- But emotionally, idealistically, a sort of wedding. And
in these realms where, even sexless, gender roles are adopted, Maximilien
has become the 'woman.'"
-Tanith Lee, The Gods Are Thirsty
"Fear had come and gone with Saint-Just, as pain had come and gone
with the surgeons. He wondered if he had ever seen Saint-Just before--
if anybody had ever really seen him. Saint-Just who had followed
him like a shadow when he had the sun in his face-- but whom he
himself must follow now that the sun was at his back."
-Marjorie Coryn, The Incorruptible
"I defend the man in question because his conduct has appeared to
me to be irreproachable, and I would accuse him if he committed
a crime. Great God! What kind of leniency is this that plots the
ruin of innocent men?"
-Saint-Just, defending Robespierre in his last speech
"Though his position with regard to Robespierre was that of
disciple to master, he has been credited by many with having been
the more dominant spirit of the two."
-Ida A. Taylor, Revolutionary Types
"The shadow of Robespierre. Wherever he goes,
I go. Except here-- he doesn't like women."
-Saint-Just in The Reign of Terror
". . . Saint-Just who was his shadow, giving body
and substance to the pure spirit of his abstract thought."
-Marjorie Coryn, The Incorruptible
"They say it's that handsome young Saint-Just-- they
say any poor lass who refuses--"
"No. It's not the ones that refuse. They say it's him, himself.
Believe me, my dear, those men who never wine nor wench. . . . him
and that pretty lad-- they say he won't let him--"
-Marjorie Coryn, The Incorruptible
*New* "Robespierre was vain, Saint-Just overweening. Robespierre was rather stiff, Saint-Just was inflexible. Saint-Just was a Robespierre drawn in sharper lines, more full-blooded, more impetuous despite his impassive airs, a Robespierre without the wordiness, the indecision, the introversion and the soul searching, but also without saving the elements of kindness and sincerity."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
*New* "Saint-Just's ideas were Robespierre's idea's sharpened, simplified, exaggerated, schematized and turned into aphorisms. Robespierre had in him a broad streak of average human befuddlement, even mediocrity; Saint-Just was a specialized machine of revolutionary precision. Robespierre denied that Sparta was his goal, Saint-Just harped continually on the ancients. Robespierre was self-righteous, Saint-Just more so...To Robespierre the straight and narrow way was plain enough, to Saint-Just it was terrifyingly obvious."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
Entertaining Quotes
"While after him there minces along Saint-Just, who
carries his so-beautiful head as carefully as a priest bearing the
Eucharist, for fear its porcelain profile may be chipped. With such
cornerstones of Revolution, we might well tremble."
-Camille Desmoulins in Tanith Lee's The Gods Are Thirsty
"A man raised so much above other men would not have been tolerated
for forty-eight hours in the cities of old: Athens would have crowned
him with laurel and promptly banished him without its walls."
-Jules Michelet
"'Tell that blond thing over there, then, not to shuffle papers
or ask his friends to have a coughing fit every time I open my mouth.'
Robespierre suggested I exaggerated. I suggested a means of hushing
Saint-Just and was promptly left alone."
-Camille in The Gods Are Thirsty
"Extreme? Me?"
-Saint-Just in the anime Rose of Versailles
"Don't bother to say good-bye. Your mask might crack."
-Camille to Saint-Just in The Gods Are Thirsty
"Sorry to be rude, but you must die here!"
-Saint-Just to a noble in the anime Rose of Versailles
"She had been in France (where St. Just, they say, inspired
her with an unfortunate passion), and loved, ever after, French
novels, French cookery, and French wines."
-William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter 10
"[Carnot]. . . differed from Robespierre, Saint-Just,
Collot and Billaud, in having a reasonably well adjusted personality."
-R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled
"On the day that I am satisfied that it is impossible
to render the French people kind, energetic, tender, and inexorable
against tyranny, I will stab myself."
-Saint-Just, quoted in The Story of France by Watson
ROBESPIERRE: (reading from Camille Desmoulins' newspaper)
Saint-Just, like John the Beloved, embraces his [Robespierre's]
neck and makes known to the Convention the apocalyptic revelations
of his master; he bears his head as though it contained the Sacred
Host.
SAINT-JUST: I'll make him carry it like Saint-Denis.
-Georg Bücher, Danton's Death
"SAINT-JUST: (Mutters.) Kill Danton-- kill Danton."
-Pam Gems, The Snow Palace
"'I made Mirabeau,' boasts the Devil's wife.
'I did worse,' is Satan's reply. 'I made Robespierre.'
'It is possible to go further,' is the retort. 'I made Saint-Just.'
And the Devil recognises the superiority of female workmanship."
-Ida A. Taylor, Revolutionary Types
Miscellaneous
"Some day, one state will take up arms against another."
-Saint-Just, on the United States
"The principal heroes of the Terror-- Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre,
and co.-- were Apostles. Like Polyeuces, destroying the alters of
the false gods to propogate his faith, they dreamed of converting
the globe."
-Gustav LeBon
"To leap to fame at twenty-three, and to die in infamy at twenty-seven--
that was his career. There was no one with more to give his country--
youth, courage, ability, and enthusiasm; yet there was not one of
its instruments that the blind force of the Revolution more contemptuously
used, and broke, and flung aside."
-J.M. Thompson, The French Revolution
"Some day men will be astonished that in the eighteenth century
humanity was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then, a tyrant
was slain in the midst of the Senate, with no formality but thirty
dagger blows, with no law but the liberty of Rome."
-Saint-Just
"Go and see Desmoulins, embrace him for me, and tell him he will
see me no more, that I esteem him as a patriot, but that I despise
him as a man, because I have read his soul, and have seen that he
is afraid I may give him away."
-Saint-Just
"The words that we have spoken shall never perish from the earth."
-Saint-Just
"Erect at the foot of the tribune, he waited with folded arms, in
silence, his tired and tranquil eyes contemplating the ruins of
a City that had been but half built."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"The conspirators who have died, think you they were the children
of liberty, because for one brief moment they resembled them?"
-Saint-Just
"I pronounce no verdict against those whom I have named. I would
have them justify themselves, and I would have us all become wiser
men."
-Saint-Just
"Saint-Just, who had once declared that the ship of the Revolution
could arrive safely in port 'only by ploughing its way boldly through
a Red Sea of blood,' looked upon the crowd with stiff disdain, his
pale brown breeches and white waistcoat still immaculate."
-Christopher Hibbert upon Saint-Just's execution, The Days of the French Revolution
"No last phrase of his is recorded, nor is there
any legend of words spoken in the hour of his death. He went up
the steps of the scaffold, and was strapped to the plank, and the
knife fell. And they buried in the cemetary of Les Errancis the
dust which he had despised."
-J.B. Morton, Saint-Just
"It was an ironic and terrible twist of history
that, for all the regime's sham trials, the one most lacking in
legal formalities, the one utterly without even the appearance of
justice, and therefore the most revolutionary in Saint-Just's sense,
was the Thermidorian 'trial' to which Robespierre, Saint-Just and
the leadership of their party were subjected. They were punished
for the crime of having ruled. . . . There were no formalities at
all."
-Ferenc Feher, in Michael Walzer's Regicide and Revolution
"What act have you committed which would cause
you to be guillotined if the counter-revolution should come?"
-Saint-Just's "test of Jacobin purity" according to Thomas
E. Watson, The Story of France vol. 2
"You, Saint-Just, will be answerable to posterity
for this blasphemy against me!"
-Danton, in Georg Bücher's Danton's Death
'Yes, Saint-Just, you go on spinning out your sentences,
with every comma the stroke of a sword, and every peroid a chopped-off
head!"
-Barère, in Georg Bücher's Danton's Death
"Saint-Just, Robespierre, Couthon, Babeuf. .
. pray for me!"
-Armand Barbès (19th century revolutionary)
"Saint-Just had known. Saint-Just had known that
the only incorruptible was Death. That was the meaning of Saint-Just,
who was [Robespierre's] own ideal of himself made manifest. Death."
-Marjorie Coryn, The Incorruptible
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