Desmoulin, CAMILLE, a famous figure in the French Revolution, was born 2d March 1760, at Guise, in Picardy. He studied law along with Robespierre at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, in Paris, but never practised owing to a stutter in his speech. His mind early became filled with lofty but confused notions of classical republicanism, which found vent on the eve of the Revolution in his pamphlets, La Philosophie au Peuple Français (1788) and La France Libre (1789), the latter published the day after the insurrection which destroyed the Bastille, in promoting which its author played a conspicuous and dramatic part. His next writing was the brilliant and vigorous Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens, which procured him the sinister title of 'Procureur-général de la lanterne.' In November 1789 he issued the first number of the Révolutions de France et de Brabant, which appeared weekly until July 1792 (No. 86), and which for combined brilliancy of wit and irony, polemic force, power of sarcasm, and grace of form, remains without an equal in the whole range of journalism. His next paper, the Tribune des Patriotes, died in its fourth number. Camille had been a member of the Cordeliers' Club from its foundation, and early clung to the mighty Danton in an affectionate friendship of singular intensity. Elected by Paris to the National Convention which followed immediately after the march of the mob on the Tuileries (August 10), he voted with his party for the death of the king. In the struggle between the Girondists and the Mountain he took an active part, and in May 1793, urged on by Robespierre, published his truculent Histoire des Brissotins, with a gay heedlessness which had a terrible success, and caused him soon afterwards the most profound remorse. Danton himself had thundered against the Girondists, who made a fatal error in insisting upon the ineffectual impeachment of Marat, but his great heart filled with pity when their heads fell under the guillotine of the relentless and triumphant Mountain (October 1793). On the 5th December of the same year came out the Vieux Cordelier, a thrilling and eloquent expression of Camille's and Danton's longing for clemency. Robespierre, at first favourable, took fright at the reception of the papers after the third, and abandoned his old fellow-student to a fate of which his fragments of writings, as well as his letters and his young wife's journals and scrap-books, show us he had already a strange presentiment. It was only in December 1790, after three years of love, that her father had permitted him to marry the bright young Lucile Duplessis, a girl of a fanciful and romantic temperament, then hardly twenty years old. Their brief married life was one of singular happiness, and in their deaths they were hardly to be divided. Meantime Hébert and his party assailed him, and his freedom of wit made fatal enemies of Billaud-Varennes and Saint-Just. The last number of the Vieux Cordelier that appeared in its author's lifetime was the sixth (February 1794). Already he had been twice accused before the Jacobin Club, when on the night of the 30th March 1794 he was arrested with Danton and a group of their friends and partisans. When formally asked his age before the Revolutionary tribunal, he replied: 'J'ai l'âge du sans-culotte, Jésus, c'est-à-dire trente-trois ans, âge fatal aux révolutionnaires.' Camille's sensitive temperament could not face death with the boisterous heroism of the Titanic Danton. But on the scaffold he recovered the courage that had deserted him in the prison and on the tumbrel. 'Thus then,' he said, as he looked at the blood stained guillotine, 'the first apostle of
Liberty ends ;' and with the words, 'Oh my poor wife !' he laid his head under the fatal knife. A fortnight later Lucile followed him to the same doom, dying with the heroic courage of the martyr. Their story is nobly told in Jules Claretie's Camille Desmoulins and his Wife (trans. by Mrs Cashel Hoey, 1876).