page_title: Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
section_title: Character
hierarchical_section_title: Louis Antoine de Saint-Just / Legacy / Character
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Buste dde Saint-Just (1767-1794), terre cuite, école française - Musée Lambinet Inv. n° 1657
context_page_description: Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just was a Jacobin leader during the French Revolution. He was a close friend of Maximilien Robespierre and served as his most trusted ally during the period of Jacobin rule in the French First Republic. Saint-Just worked as a legislator and a military commissar, but he achieved a lasting reputation as the face of the Reign of Terror. He publicly delivered the condemnatory reports that emanated from Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety and defended the use of violence against opponents of the government. He supervised the arrests of some of the most famous figures of the Revolution and saw many of them off to the guillotine. For his unyielding severity, later writers dubbed him the "Angel of Death".
  From its beginning in 1789, the Revolution enthralled the young Saint-Just, who strove to take a leading role. Early on, he became a commander in his local National Guard unit. Shortly after reaching the minimum legal age of 25 in August 1792, he won election as a deputy to the National Convention in Paris.
context_section_description: Ambitious and active-minded, Saint-Just worked urgently and tirelessly towards his goals: "For Revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb". He was repeatedly described by contemporaries as arrogant, believing himself to be a skilled leader and orator as well as having proper revolutionary character. This self-assurance manifested itself in a superiority complex, and he always "made it clear… that he considered himself to be in charge and that his will was law". Camille Desmoulins wrote of Saint-Just, "He carries his head like a sacred host".
  Saint-Just's rise to power wrought a remarkable change in his personality. Freewheeling and passionate in his youth, Saint-Just quickly became focused, "tyrannical and pitilessly thorough". He became "the ice-cold ideologist of republican purity", "as inaccessible as stone to all the warm passions". A measure of his change can be inferred from the experience of his former love interest Thérèse, who is known to have left her husband and taken up residence in a Parisian neighborhood near Saint-Just in late 1793. Saint-Just—who had already developed something of a relationship, tepid but potentially expedient, with the sister of his colleague Lebas—refused to see her. Thérèse stayed there for over a year, returning to Blérancourt only after Saint-Just was dead. No record exists of any exchanges they might have had, but Saint-Just is known to have written to a friend complaining impatiently about the rumors connecting him to "citizen Thorin".
  In his public speaking, Saint-Just was even more daring and outspoken than his mentor Robespierre. Regarding France's internal strife, he spared few: "You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it". He thought the only way to create a true republic was to rid it of enemies, to enforce the "complete destruction of its opposite". Regarding the war, he declared without regret to the Convention, "The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood". He urged the deputies to embrace the notion that "a nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses".
  Despite his flaws, Saint-Just is often accorded respect for the strength of his convictions. Although his words and actions may be viewed as reprehensible, his commitment to them is rarely questioned: he was "implacable but sincere". Like Robespierre, he was incorruptible in the sense that he exhibited no attraction to material benefits but devoted himself entirely to the advancement of a political agenda.  Given all of the foregoing information sociopathy was clearly an element of Saint-Just's character.
caption: Terracotta bust of Saint-Just at the Musée Lambinet in Versailles.
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