Charlotte de Robespierre

Marie Marguerite Charlotte de Robespierre (5 February 1760, Arras – 1 August 1834, Paris) was a French writer and revolutionary. A Jacobin during the French Revolution, she is best known for the memoirs she dictated about the lives of her brothers, Maximilien Robespierre and Augustin Robespierre.

Charlotte Robespierre

Life

She was the second child of François de Robespierre and Jacqueline Marguerite Carrault, and the sister of Maximilien, Henriette and Augustin Robespierre.

After the death of her mother, she and Henriette were both sent to live with their paternal aunts when her father left their home. They were given the typical education for middle- and upper-class daughters in pre-Revolutionary France, and educated in a convent school. In 1781, she left the convent school to live with her two brothers in Arras (her sister having then died). She never married, and was described as respectable and entirely devoted to her brothers, to whom she was fiercely loyal.

In 1789, her brother Maximilien moved to Paris, and Charlotte and Augustin followed some time later. She lived with Augustin and moved about in the political circles of revolutionary Paris. In 1791, she led a campaign against Barbe-Therese Marchand's Affiches d'Artois, an anti-Jacobin newspaper. In 1793, after a Federalist revolt broke out in Nice, she was sent along with Augustin as part of a group to suppress the revolt. When her brothers were arrested in 1794, she unsuccessfully petitioned for permission to visit them. She was herself arrested and interrogated, but ultimately released.[1]

After the fall of her brother she lived under very limited circumstances, and was taken care of by friends. In 1803, she was given a modest pension. After she denounced a forged memoir of Maximilien that was published in 1830, she met Albert Laponneraye, who would subsequently write her memoirs after her dictation, focusing heavily on the lives of her brothers. She died in Paris in 1834.[2]

References
  1. Dite, Chris (17 May 2023). "Charlotte Robespierre Fought the Forces of Reaction". Jacobin. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  2. "La soeur de l'Incorruptible Charlotte de Robespierre écrivit ses "Mémoires" pour rendre justice à son frère Maximilien Ils sont aujourd'hui portés à la scène par Reine Bartève et Jean-Marie Lehec". Le Monde. 12 November 1989. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  • Gabriel Pioro et Pierre Labracherie, «Charlotte Robespierre, ihren Memoiren und ihre Freunde», dans Maximilien Robespierre, Berlin, éditions Markov, 1958.
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