Lucile Desmoulins
Anne-Lucile-Philippe Desmoulins, born Laridon-Duplessis (18 January 1770 in Paris – 13 April 1794) was a French diarist during the French Revolution and married to the revolutionary Camille Desmoulins. Life. Lucile Duplessis Desmoulins was the daughter of Claude-Etienne Laridon-Duplessis, an official of the French Treasury, and Anne-Françoise-Marie Boisdeveix. Some sources have claimed that her younger sister, Adèle Duplessis, born in 1774, was briefly engaged to Maximilien Robespierre. Though she would eventually marry Camille Desmoulins, the two first met when Lucile was much younger, and Camille was an admirer of her mother. Lucile was  headstrong, and when she fell in love with Camille, ten years her senior, her father refused the marriage. Finally, Lucile’s father agreed, and the couple was married on 29 December 1790, at the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. Signatories to their marriage included Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, Jacques Pierre Brissot, and Maximilien Robespierre. The Desmoulins' only child, Horace Camille, was born on 6 July 1792. In one of her journals, Lucile talks about what happened on the Insurrection of 10 August 1792. "9 August 1792. What will become of us? I can endure no more. Camille, O my  poor Camille, what will become of you? O God, if it be true that thou hast existence, save the men who are worthy of Thee. We want to be free. O God, the cost of it! As a climax to my misery, courage abandons me." On 5 April 1794 Lucile Desmoulins was arrested on charges that she had conspired to free her husband (then imprisoned in the Conciergerie while on trial with Georges-Jacques Danton) and for plotting the ruin of the republic. Camille learned of his young wife’s arrest before he and his fellow victims were taken to  the guillotine on the afternoon of 5 April 1794; Camille died knowing that Lucile, too, was likely to be executed. Indeed, Lucile followed him to the guillotine on 13 April 1794. She is reported to have remarked, while awaiting her execution, "They have assassinated the best of men. If I did not hate them for that, I should bless them for the service they have done me this day." Lucile’s father died in 1794. Horace Camille Desmoulins, not yet two years old, was raised by Lucile's mother and sister. He migrated to Haiti in 1817, married, and had  four children. Horace died of yellow fever in Jacmel, near the southern coast of Haiti, in 1825. His birth date is stated incorrectly on his grave marker. Appreciation. Lucile Desmoulins is the heroine of Georg Büchner's play "Danton's Death". She appears prominently in "A Place of Greater Safety" (1993) by Hilary Mantel. Lucile Desmoulins has been played in movies by: She is the subject of the fourth movement of composer Kate Soper's piece "Voices from the Killing Jar", 2012.