Camille Desmoulins

Character Name: Lucie Simplice Camille Benoist Desmoulins

Canon/Original: Canon

Gender: Male

Age: 34

Political Sect: Jacobin

Physical Description (five sentence minimum): “Interesting” would perhaps be a fair word to describe Camille’s appearance. While it would be unfair to call him ugly, nor could one honestly call him handsome. He is of average height, skinny, with shoulder length, dark brown hair he wears loose and unpowdered. His dark eyes gleam with flashes of cleverness or malevolence, whichever you would like to call it, and his thin lips are equally prepared to burst into a grin or twist into a sneer. Although he does not dress with the affected shabbiness of some revolutionaries, the past few years of financial stability have not been sufficient to erase some lingering traces of poverty from his earlier days that occasionally appear in his posture or expression, clinging to him like a shadow. He often appears anxious or agitated and has difficulty remaining still for long stretches of time.

Personality (fifteen sentence minimum): Camille is the enfant terrible of the Revolution. He is in turns brilliant and self-destructive, arrogant and insecure, eloquent and immature. Acknowledged as one of the principal authors of the Revolution, his first concern is always to serve it, as well as the Republic. However, it is not always easy for him to determine the best way to do this. In person, his personality can be passive and pliable. He seeks guidance and protection from other men who are more natural leaders than he, such as Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre. His deep insecurity stems from his family’s longstanding, bitter disapproval of his lifestyle and his failure to conform to their bourgeois expectations. In order to prove himself, he is prone to rash, impulsive actions which he may regret later. He is emotionally unstable and at the moments when he is most upset his repressed childhood stammer reveals itself. Luckily, he finds comfort in the arms of his beloved wife, though he can be a less than constant husband. In writing, however, Camille loses his inhibitions- he is clever, eloquent, and confident… Though he can be sarcastic and cruel as well. Overall, Camille has a great sense of joie de vivre. He fully believes the purpose of the Revolution is to bring people happiness, so he is distressed to find the opposite occurring. Recently, he has begun to try to move away from the powerful men he has followed in the past to be recognized as his own agent, acting and speaking for himself, but he is finding that to be a dangerous path…

History (fifteen sentence minimum): Camille Desmoulins was born on March 2, 1760 in Guise, a small town in Picardy. His family was not wealthy; his father was only a minor official of the town and he was the oldest of seven children. Fortunately, Camille’s precociousness and intelligence caught the eye of some wealthy relatives who managed to obtain a scholarship for him to the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. At school he met another scholarship student, Maximilien de Robespierre, and the two became close friends. Also during his school years, Camille developed the stammer that would haunt him for the rest of his life. No one knew what caused it and Camille absolutely refuses to speak about it even as an adult, by which time he had learned to suppress it except in the most emotional moments. Nevertheless, he was a gifted student and graduated with a degree in law at age 25.

Rather than return to Guise, which he found so dreary and dull, Camille eagerly stayed in Paris to practice law. Unfortunately, so did every other young lawyer. Paris was swamped with lawyers and Camille was not a particularly good one anyway. His stammer prevented him from effectively pleading cases and, in all honesty, his personality was not particularly suited to work as a lawyer. He dreamed of being a writer. He worked here and there a clerk to support himself while he wrote pamphlets that printers rejected for being too radical. He quickly sunk into extreme poverty, keeping himself afloat only by constantly writing to his father to beg for money.

During this time, Camille was hired by Claude Duplessis, a wealthy civil servant, to tutor his two daughters, Lucile and Adèle. Camille took the post and quickly became enamored with Monsieur Duplessis’s wife, Annette, a woman in her early 40s holding onto her beauty with a great deal of success. Despite Camille’s attentions, Annette never seriously considered taking him as a lover- she was far too sensible a woman. However, she looked on him fondly and did her best to protect him in their family after her husband began to grow suspicious of him. Under the guise of tutor and student, and as a family friend, Camille’s relationship with Lucile became friendly and gradually his affections shifted from mother to daughter. This was too much for Monsieur Duplessis, who promptly banned Camille from ever setting foot in his house again. Alas, it was too late; Camille and Lucile were in love.

Upon the announcement of the meeting of the Estates General, Camille flung himself into the spirit of political reform sweeping France. He ran for election as a deputy to the Third Estate in Guise, but lost. This only cemented his bitterness towards his home town and he threw himself into Parisian popular politics, spending his days at the Palais Royal where he joined the masses of popular orators declaiming from atop tables outside of cafés. He often traveled to Versailles to witness to meeting of the Estates General. He was pleased to discover his old school friend, Maximilien de Robespierre, serving as a deputy of Arras. Due to these frequent trips to Versailles, Camille was among the first to discover that the King had fired Necker, the popular finance minister.

On July 12, 1789, Camille rushed back to the Palais Royal, where he leaped upon a table and announced that the King had fired Necker and that the citizens of Paris must arm themselves against an attack from the royal troops surrounding Paris. Two days later the Bastille fell. The Revolution had begun, and so had Camille’s career. He was swept into the circles of the early Revolutionary elite, liberal aristocrats like the Duc d’Orléans and the Comte de Mirabeau invited him to their homes and took him under their wings. Suddenly Camille’s pamphlets were no longer too radical to print and he began the successful newspaper La France Libre and published the cruelly amusing pamphlet La Lanterne, written in the voice of the most popular lamppost used by the mob for lynching unpopular officials. Despite the success of his writings, recognition did not bring financial success and he remained in poverty.

Around this time, Camille made the acquaintance of Georges Jacques Danton, a successful lawyer with a similar lust for life, who had all the commanding presence and authority Camille lacked. They befriended each other and while Danton made his name through popular oratory, Camille made his through his increasingly radical journalism that gave him as many enemies as admirers. He pursued his suit of Lucile through the secret help of her mother, for while her father could no longer say he was a nobody without prospects, he was not keen on admitting a crazy revolutionary into the family. Nevertheless, love prevailed and at the end of 1790, Camille and Lucile were married and in July, 1792 they had a son, Horace.

After August 10 and the downfall of the monarchy, Camille became secretary to Danton’s Minister of Justice under the Provisional Government. He was elected as a deputy to the National Convention, where he enthusiastically embraced the newly born Republic, voting for Louis XVI’s death at his trial. As the Convention divided between the Montagnards and the Girondins, Camille aligned himself with the Mountain. In service of the Mountain, Camille wrote the pamphlet Brissot Demasqué that compiled a laundry list of the Girdonins’ crimes against the Revolution. It was a great success and helped lead the Girondins to the Tribunal. However, Camille began to regret what he had done and when all of them were condemned to death he broke down, screaming that he had murdered his friends. From this moment on, Camille’s faith in the Revolution was irrevocably shaken. While some of his friends were sucked deeper into the ideology of the Terror, others found themselves in prison for conspiring against the government.

Once more, in December 1793, Camille took up his pen to begin Le Vieux Cordelier, a newspaper calling for moderation of the Terror and supporting Danton’s call for a committee of clemency. The initial issues were supported by Robespierre himself because they attacked the Hébertists, their mutual enemy who called for an intensification of the Terror. However, Camille began to see things in a new light. All his life he had been protected by his friends, dismissed as “just Camille,” acknowledged as too clever for his own good and not to be taken seriously. With Le Vieux Cordelier he is beginning to demand to be taken seriously. In the third issue he attacked extremist members of the government, coming ever closer to attacking the government itself, which cannot be accepted… He is quickly finding himself in political peril, his membership in the Jacobin Club on the verge of being revoked, and his revolutionary credentials questioned. Yet he relies upon his friendship with Robespierre and his appeal to the French people for support. Surely they would not abandon him…

Sample RP:

An absolutely superb application. Accepted with pleasure.