Madame Guillotine

Anne Lucile Philippa Laridon-Duplessis was born in Paris in 1771 to a rich financier Étienne-Claude Duplessis-Laridon and his wife Anne-Françoise-Marie Boisdeveix. She had one elder sister, Adèle, who was widowed at an early age and then returned home to live with her parents. Lucile is known to us through her copious and highly romantic journals and was clearly an imaginative, highly strung rather mutinous girl who delighted in throwing her family into uproar by falling in love with one of her mother’s admirers (and possible lover) Camille Desmoulins, a journalist who was ten years her senior and had rather a grim reputation for general philandering. Despite this he was passionately in love with Lucile and would remain devoted to her throughout their short life together.

After Camille’s infamous involvement in the fall of the Bastille, Lucile’s father eventually gave his consent to their marriage and they were duly married on 29 December 1790 at Saint Sulpice in Paris with the groom’s best friend Robespierre as a witness. Lucile wore a pink silk dress and was much admired. The young couple set up home in the Cordeliers district of Paris and lived quite lavishly thanks to Lucile’s dowry. Their son, Horace was born on 6 July 1792 and had Robespierre as his godfather.

For a brief while, the Desmoulins couple were at the centre of a happy group of friends, living at one point with the Danton couple, Georges and Gabrielle and enjoying cosy fireside evenings with Robespierre, who had been Camille’s best friend at school and who they schemed to marry to Lucile’s sister, Adèle.

In time Camille began to turn against the Terror as championed by Robespierre and his own cousins, Saint-Just and Fouquier-Tinville and sided with Danton, who dedicated himself to bringing more moderacy to France and ending the Terror. This was not a popular move with the Committee of Public Safety and on 4 April 1794, after an astonishing and dramatic trial, Danton, Desmoulins and their followers were guillotined. They were ultimately condemned by a false report that Lucile had been inciting her English and royalist friends to overthrow the revolution. Camille died knowing that his beloved wife was certain to be executed as well.

Lucile was duly arrested and executed on 13 April 1794, showing enormous courage at her execution, telling Fouquier-Tinville that she was ‘less to be pitied than’ him. Her last letter, to her mother (who now had the care of the orphaned two year old Horace), says: “Good night, dearest mother. A tear falls from my eye for you. I will go to sleep in the tranquillity of innocence. Lucile.”

Lucile and Camille’s young son Horace was raised by his grandmother and aunt Adèle, assisted by a pension granted by the French government. At a young age, he went to live in Haiti, which his father had always dreamed of and married a local girl, Zoë Villafranche in 1818. They had four children and founded their own Desmoulins dynasty, wherein the names Camille and Lucile were passed down from generation to generation.