Tumgik
#spontaneously i’d say teachers telling students they’re going to get executed is a bit more serious than students being too ungodly
Text
Abbe Proyart talking shit about his former students compilation
(With the exception of student Robespierre, who he spoke so much shit about you can make a whole post only about it)
Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre's warmest friend and most ardent advocate, was the son of a Lieutenant-General of the Bailliage of Guise in Picardy. Appointed as scholar by the Chapter of Laon at the College of Louis-le-Grand, he completed his studies, if not with distinction, at least with some success. Although from then on he wrote his scholastic compositions well, he spoke very heavily and stammered in speech. He had an ugly and repulsive exterior, a black complexion, and something sinister about his eyes. He had nevertheless announced in his early youth the double emulation of work and virtue; but, disturbed in his higher classes by vicious comrades, he abjured piety, and soon showed himself a more bitter enemy than even those who had driven him away from it. From then on, a muddled spirit, surly and eloquent, he made himself odious to all his fellow students, and no longer had a single friend among them. We then saw him, son of nature and ungrateful disciple, displaying all the feelings of a bad heart. He made his debut at the bar with a plea against his father, whom he pretended to oblige to furnish him in Paris with an interview which exceeded his faculties. He never forgave his Masters for the efforts they had made to correct his budding vices. In the time of the Revolution, he was still cruelly resentful of one of them, on the occasion of a close encounter fifteen years earlier. “I will never forgive him, he said, for having told me one day that I would mount the scaffold.” However, if the horoscope wasn’t flattering, it was nonetheless verified. We shall see later how, still believing himself to be the friend of Robespierre, he was rewarded for his revolutionary labors by his friend. La vie et les crimes de Robespierre, surnommé Le Tyran, depuis sa naissamce jusqu’à sa mort(1795) by Le Blond de Neuvéglise (abbé Proyart), page 93
Fréron, in his youth, showed a gloomy and defimulated character, especially near his masters. He announced rather few talents, and no will to cultivate them; he was also cited as a rare example when speaking of laziness and indolence. He was one of those indifferent to religion to whom justice is done by always suspecting their morals. Coming out from the college, he walked his impoverished existence for a long time on the pavement of the Capital, a burden equally incumbent upon both his family and Abbé Royou, his protector and brother of the estimable Madame Fréron. Ibid, page 90
Duport-du Tertre, born in Paris, of a not very wealthy family, after having done fairly good studies at the College of Louis-le-Grand, became a lawyer, and got a certain reputation, above all, for probity and justice. He was of a gentle and honest character, although a little cold. He loved work and solitude. His conduct at the College had always been good; but of a wisdom more philosophical than religious. He was not born to be a scoundrel, and it cannot be said that he was; but he had not enough religion to cling to, in a slippery step, to the great principles which it enshrines, and he abandoned them. As Constitutional Minister, he tried to serve the Constitution and the King; and, without doing anything useful for the King or for the Constitution, he could not escape the guillotine. It had been less by any particular affection than at the request of his old college comrades whom Duport-du Tertre had endeavored to make known to Robespierre, whom he knew little of himself. Robespierre, in return for the disinterested zeal he had shown him on his arrival in Paris, worked harder than any other Jacobin to make him suspect and determine his execution. Ibid, page 85-86
Le Brun, known in his youth under the name of Abbé Tondu, was from Noyon. Provided by the Chapter of this City with a scholarship assigned to young clerics, he found himself a contemporary of Robespierre at the College of Louis-le-Grand. He had made less of a sensation than him in his humanities, but showed more talent in philosophy. He then bore an extraordinary depth of timidity, which he retained something of his whole life. He was one of those soft and easy characters who, having neither the boldness of crime nor the courage of virtue, become what circumstances and societies that surround them make them into. The Abbé Tondu, who liked neither his estate nor his name, left both at the same time, and called himself Le Brun, after his mother. Leaving the college, he obtained at the Observatory one of the Places paid by the King to young men who had a marked inclination for Mathematics. The bad companies having thrown him into licentiousness, he pledged himself to it. […] The tottering Minister tried in vain to rely on his old liaisons with Robespierre: Robespierre no longer knew as a friend the one who could also have been friend of a man whose pride had always revolted his own. Le Brun did not cause the death of the King; but, like Dumouriez, he had the cowardice to consent to it; and, like him, he truly became its accomplice, while doing nothing of all that he ought to have done to prevent it, or to provoke vengeance. Ibid, page 87-88
Noël, born under the name Dumouchel to poor parents, had received, like Robespierre, the gratuitous education of the poor. Student first at the College des Grassins, then at that of Louis-le-Grand; after rather brilliant successes in the distribution of the University Prizes, he was made quarter master, and then professor, at the College of Louis-le-Grand. This sudden passage, from extreme poverty to the last term of ambition among the young masters of the university, turned his head. He had little religion, he became impious. At the beginning of the Revolution, his sentiments, expressed in a journal of which he had made himself the editor, earned him a post as clerk in the war office, and then a secret mission on the part of the Jacobins in a foreign court. Friend of Camille Desmoulins, the latter had introduced him to Robespierre when he arrived in Paris for the Estates-General. Robespierre, although welcomed and celebrated by Noël, had conceived against him a fund of aversion, because he had obtained more constant successes than him at the University, and because Camille Desmoulins never ceased to exalt his talents. He spared him at first as a proponent useful to his views, then fell out with him, and then lost him as soon as he found the occasion. Ibid, page 86-87
It is again from this school that came two low servants of these man-tigers, and the worthy adjudans of their villainy: the name of one was Sijas, that of the other Pilot. Sijas had obtained, from his college comrade Robespierre, the employment of confidence of overseeing the massacres of the guillotine in Paris; and Pilot, exercising the same Commission in Lyon, wrote to Robespierre that the pleasure of seeing the Lyonnais having their throats cut restored his health. Louis XVI détrôné d’être Roi, ou tableau des causes de la Révolution française et de l’ébranlement de tous les trônes (1803) by Abbé Proyart, cited in Le collège Louis-le-Grand, séminaire de la Révolution (1913) by H. Monin.
And some of his fellow teachers too…
None of his masters contributed so much to the growth of the republican virus fermenting in his (Robespierre’s) soul than his Professor of Rhetoric. An enthusiastic admirer of the heroes of ancient Rome, M. Hérivaux, nicknamed The Roman by his students, thought that Robespierre’s personality had a strong Roman physiognomy. He praised him, cajoled him unceasingly, sometimes even congratulated him very seriously on this precious similarity. Robespierre, no less seriously, favored compliments, and was grateful to bear the soul of a Roman, be it the atrocious soul of a parricidal Brutus, or that of a conspiratorial Catiline.   La vie et les crimes de Robespierre… (1795) page 46-47
One day, however, a prefect, suddenly opening a door, finds him (Robespierre) on the commode reading a very nasty pamphlet. Caught in flagrante delicto, Robespierre thought himself lost; and, forgetting his natural pride, falls at the feet of the Arbiter of his fate and comes down to the humblest supplications. The Master with whom he had to deal was neither inflexible nor fervent in Morale. He was a man who had been heard more than once to exclaim among the young people: "Long live liberty, my friends: far from us the hypocrisy.” It was the Abbé Audrein, who since deserved, by his apostasy, to become the collegue of Robespierre in the Assembly of Factious, where he still sits. With such a judge, the affair of the bad book was civilized without difficulty, and did not even come to the knowledge of the other Masters of the House. Ibid, page 37-38
Dumouchel, son of a poor Peasant from Picardy, would not have found within his family any resource for his education: the Sanctuary and the charity of the Faithful paid all the expense. Scholar of the Community of Ste. Barbe, he entered the College of Louis-le-Grand in quality of a quarter master. He fortified himself to go and teach Rhetoric at Rhodez, from where he was called back to Paris to occupy a chair at the College de la Marche. The Abbé Royou, to whom he paid court, had employed him, for a time, for the drafting of certain unimportant articles of his journal, which he had no leisure to deal with himself. A fairly ritual appearance, a supple character, a lot of talk, a little literature, and many more ambitious pretensions had given Dumouchel a certain reputation among that swarm of deplorable subjects which filled the Colleges of Paris; and, by their votes, he found himself Rector of the University at the time of the holding of the Estates-General. Hiding his unbridled ambition and his irreligion under the mask of the most complete devotion to the respectable Archbishop of this Capital, he united the voices of the Clergy for the Deputation. Scarcely had the Hypocrite been in possession of the title he aspired to, than, abandoning the sacred interests which had been entrusted to him, he formed an alliance with Robespierre, whom he at first advocated, and of whom he was later advocated, so much so that the Jacobins of Paris, judging him worthy of the Episcopat, sent his name to the Club of the town of Nismes, with the injunction to make the subject known to the electors of the department, as the one who suited them and whom they should name. All the Catholic Electors, with the exception of two, having refused to cooperate in the crime of an intrusion by Eve that the Protestant Electors, less delicate, assembled, gave their votes to the one whom the Jacobins had designated for them; and Dumouchel, proclaimed Constitutionally Catholic Bishop that, by fifteen Electors only, of which thirteen were Protestants, said goodbye to his friend Robespierre, and went to install himself in the Episcopal Palace of Nismes, which soon, as we know, was defiled by the most scandalous Scenes. Ibid, page 83-85
38 notes · View notes