Camille Desmoulins

Camille Desmoulins was a French journalist and politician who played a key role in the French Revolution. He is most famous for helping to spark the events that led to the Storming of the Bastille. Later, as editor of the journal *Le Vieux Cordelier*, he became known for his harsh criticism of the Reign of Terror. He was a former schoolmate and close friend of Maximilien Robespierre, and a close friend and political ally of Georges Danton, both leading revolutionary figures.

Trained as a lawyer, Desmoulins was captivated by the Revolution from the start. On 12 July 1789, after King Louis XVI dismissed the popular finance minister Jacques Necker, Desmoulins gave a fiery speech to a crowd in front of the Palais-Royal, calling them to arms. This agitation set off widespread unrest in Paris, leading directly to the Storming of the Bastille two days later. Using his new fame, Desmoulins quickly became a prominent radical pamphleteer. He openly argued for republicanism and revolutionary violence, and relentlessly attacked not only the old regime but also former revolutionary allies like Jacques Pierre Brissot. His campaigns helped bring down the Girondist faction and usher in the Reign of Terror.

During the Terror, Desmoulins and Danton moved away from Robespierre’s radical Montagnards. Through his new journal *Le Vieux Cordelier*, Desmoulins condemned the excesses of the Revolutionary Government and called for mercy. This enraged Robespierre and led to Desmoulins’s downfall. In April 1794, he was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined alongside Danton and other accused Dantonists.

Desmoulins was born in Guise, in Picardy, northern France. His father, Jean Benoît Nicolas Desmoulins, was a lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Guise. His mother was Marie-Madeleine Godart, from Wiège-Faty. Through a friend’s help, his father secured a scholarship for the fourteen-year-old Camille to attend the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There, Desmoulins proved an outstanding student even among notable classmates like Maximilien Robespierre and Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron. He excelled in Classical Literature and Politics, and developed a particular love for Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy.

Desmoulins first tried a legal career, gaining acceptance as an advocate in the Parlement of Paris in 1785. But a stammer and a lack of connections in the Parisian legal world held him back. Frustrated, he turned to writing, and his interest in public affairs led him into political journalism. In March 1789, his father was nominated as a deputy to the Estates-General from Guise but was too ill to take his seat. Camille, limited to watching the procession of the Estates-General on 5 May 1789, wrote a response called *Ode aux États Généraux*. The powerful Comte de Mirabeau briefly hired Desmoulins to write for his newspaper, boosting his reputation as a journalist.

Because of his struggles as a lawyer, Desmoulins’s life in Paris was unstable, and he often lived in poverty. Still, the reformist energy around the summoning of the Estates-General greatly inspired him. In letters to his father, he praised the deputies’ procession into Versailles and criticized the events that led to the closing of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs and the Tennis Court Oath. The dismissal of Necker on 11 July 1789 was the spark that made Desmoulins famous. On Sunday 12 July, hearing the news, he jumped onto a table outside the Café de Foy in the Palais Royal garden and gave an impassioned call to arms. Losing his usual stammer in the excitement, he urged the crowd to take up arms and wear cockades to recognize each other, calling Necker’s dismissal the signal for a massacre of patriots. The large number of troops, many foreign, stationed in Paris convinced Desmoulins and others that a massacre was imminent. His audience agreed, and they quickly joined him in riots that spread across Paris. The first cockades were green, symbolizing hope, made from leaves of the trees in the Palais Royal. But green was also the color of the King’s conservative brother, the Comte d’Artois, so the cockades were soon replaced with Paris’s traditional red and blue. On 14 July, the people of Paris attacked the Hôtel des Invalides for weapons; Desmoulins was among them, arming himself with a musket, bayonet, and two pistols, and then took part in the Storming of the Bastille.

In June 1789, Desmoulins had written a radical pamphlet titled *La France Libre*.