Rehabilitation: Political, Literary, and Social, 1795–1815

Rousselin managed to return to public service, but he continued to face recriminations for his participation in revolutionary violence. He became a confidential secretary for General Lazare Hoche, then Paul Barras, and finally Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte when he became minister of war. Forced out by Napoleon’s rise to power, Rousselin devoted himself to writing biographies of Republican generals and to finding new friends Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël. He also had a relationship with Josephine Beauharnais, which angered Napoleon, who tried to send him to Egypt as a diplomat. He went into hiding, had a child, and got married to a cousin of Barras, all while serving as a police spy. In 1813 he was adopted by his mother’s second husband and when he died, became comte de Saint-Albin. Surprisingly, he rallied to Bonaparte during the Hundred Days serving as secretary-general under Lazare Carnot at the Interior Ministry.

Remembering and Forgetting the French Revolution: Memories and Memoirs

For Rousselin, one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution was that fundamental change took time. He believed that it was the speed and the depth of the crisis of 1793–94 that led to violence. What helped a Revolutionary become a liberal was an acceptance of a slower pace of change. Rousselin used his position and then his time in retirement to try to refine his legacy and avoid further controversy. His choices about what to write and what to publish aimed to propagate a particular vision of the Revolution and his role in it. He wanted to be remembered as a victim not a perpetrator of the Terror. But he could not stop challenges to that vision from appearing; it was love for family that convinced him to retire from the spotlight to contemplate the past and hope for the future.

The Consequences of Terror, 1794–1796

Returning from his missions, Rousselin found the capital riven by factions divided in part by the proper role of Revolutionary violence. After reining in the popular movement in March, the faction led by Maximilien Robespierre turned on Rousselin’s patrons, Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton, who were guillotined in April 1794. Rousselin sought alternative networks but Robespierre and Georges Couthon turned on him and sent him to the Revolutionary Tribunal because of denunciations from Troyes. Rousselin helped to gather former friends of Danton and pushed ultra-terrorists like Joseph Fouche to act. On 9 Thermidor, Robespierre and his friends were executed in turn. The Terror, however, continued as many of the tactics of the terrorists were turned against them by those they had tormented. Rousselin spent two years in and out of jail until an amnesty was proclaimed in 1796.

Conclusion: Satisfactions and Regrets of a Life in Revolution

Alexandre Rousselin, comte de Saint-Albin, never escaped the past. In retirement, further evidence of his activities during the Terror were published. Some continued to vilify him even long after his death in 1847. He remained committed to the ideals of the Revolution, but recognized that they would take a long time to fulfill. Obsessed with his legacy, he focused ever more on family. His hopes for the future centered on making sure that his actions did not prevent them from being incorporated into the French elite. If the Revolution was about making a new world, the governments of the nineteenth century saw some of the “new men” of the Revolution achieve social mobility, like Rousselin and his descendants.

The Making of a Terrorist, 1792–1794

As Danton’s secretary and an activist in Paris, Alexandre Rousselin was baptized in Revolutionary violence during the September Massacres. With the establishment of the Republic, the hopes and fears of militants increasingly saw violence as justified to protect the Revolution. Rousselin emerged as a spokesperson for the popular movement when it demanded the arrest of a political faction known as the Girondins on 31 May 1793. This action helped him become an influential journalist and bureaucrat as an ad hoc system of governmental Terror was created. As part of that process, Rousselin was sent eastward to Champagne by the Committee of Public Safety in the fall of 1793. First in Provins and then in Troyes, Rousselin deployed novel instruments of popular pressure so widespread in Paris against recalcitrant populations that did not feel the same urgency. He became a terrorist for what he thought were the best of reasons.

Education for Change, 1773–1792

Of humble background Alexandre received a first-class education thanks to a long-term relationship between his mother and a noble army officer. At Paris’ Collège d’Harcourt, he gained the tools to interact with and serve alongside France’s elite. He attached himself to a young lawyer, Camille Desmoulins, who played an important role in whipping up popular enthusiasm in the Palais Royale during the crisis of July 1789 and emerged as an important journalist. Rousselin became his confidential secretary but then switched over to Georges-Jacques Danton, an orator and politician of growing influence. Intimately engaged in the work of both men, Rousselin watched and participated in the growth of Paris’ popular movement as Louis XVI’s intransigence and foreign war led toward the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792.

Liberalism and the Press, 1816–1838

Rousselin was part of a team of liberal Bonapartists who founded a newspaper during the Hundred Days. It struggled with censorship and finding a permanent name, but from 1819 until World War I, the newspaper became Le Constitutionnel. It was a swift success, becoming the bestselling newspaper on the planet by 1825; its profits made Rousselin wealthy. The paper became the liberal standard-bearer in criticizing the growing authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the Bourbon government for its heavy-handed censorship, fighting numerous battles in the courts and in public opinion. The liberal critique helped undermine support for the government among the elite, and facilitated the Revolution of 1830 and the installation of Rousselin’s friend Louis-Philippe d’Orléans as “King of the French.” Renewed attention to Rousselin’s terrorist past led him to sell his stake in Le Constitutionnel in 1838.

Introduction: A Romantic Remembers the French Revolution

The introduction considers how a former terrorist dealt with the legacy of the Revolution. A macabre incident relating to the remains of Charlotte Corday, who murdered the journalist Jean-Paul Marat, sets up a discussion of how Alexandre Rousselin wanted his participation in the Revolution remembered. He wanted a reputation not as a perpetrator of the Terror, but as someone who resisted it by trying to save his mentors Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton from the guillotine. The introduction also sketches Rousselin’s decades-long transition from republican to liberal, underscoring both how unusual his trajectory was and how his life exemplifies the broader themes of the Age of Revolution.