Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 681 / January 13, 1877

In every account of the French Revolution, there crop up names of actors in that terrible drama, not to be forgotten. The very vileness of these individuals has rendered their names imperishable. Execrated by successive generations, it would never occur to us that a time would come when, by a distortion of principle, literature would try to gloss over the evil deeds of these infamous personages, and hold them up to general admiration and pity. It would be imagined that Robespierre, Marat, St Just, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hebert, Couthon, and a number of others, were too bad—too persistently wicked—to evoke sentiments of compassion. Time, however, brings about unexpected changes. For anything we can tell, some plodding enthusiast may be ransacking archives, and gathering traditions to represent Robespierre as a noble-minded hero, whose character has been altogether misunderstood. Marat, too, may possibly soon be spoken of with gentle regret—as what a worthy young man he was when studying medicine at Edinburgh, and living in modest lodgings in the College Wynd, and so on; making him out to be a prodigy of excellence. As a commencement to this new and undesirable literature, comes a biography of Camille Desmoulins, by a French writer, Jules Claretie, purporting to be founded on hitherto unpublished documents, and which appears before us as an English translation. Not a paltry-looking book is it by any means, but a handsomely printed octavo, of nearly five hundred pages, embellished with a portrait of the hero Camille. After that nothing will surprise us.
Unless for a hope of drawing some useful moral for the benefit of young and ardent spirits, we should not have ventured on any notice of this extraordinary production. What the moral is, will appear as we go along. It may be worth while in the first place to say that Claretie, the writer of the book, almost worships his hero. He sets out by describing him as the ' gamin of genius, whom Paris attracted, seduced, and kept for ever;' and then, to let us know the fullest particulars of the wonderful gamin , he makes a pilgrimage to the small town of Guise, in Picardy, where Camille was born, 2d March 1760. The antique little town is gone through from end to end; and the house in which Camille first drew breath, and spent his early years, situated in the street of the Grand Pont, in front of the Place d'Armes, is minutely described. Claretie was shocked to find that the inhabitants of the town had no remembrance of his hero. 'They have forgotten their unfortunate townsman, the generous fool, the madcap of genius, who gave his life to the Republic—they have forgotten, after having misunderstood, and perhaps calumniated him.'