Les Saisons

Series Metadata

Creator:
Series Begun:
2018-08-10
Series Updated:
2019-07-09
Description:

Maximilien Robespierre attempts to navigate and balance the role of love and desire between individuals and his wider responsibilities to the People.

Notes:

A/N: While the author may be dead, I would suggest this series is best understood by considering it a response fic rather than standard RPF. Hence, while I've legitimately attempted to be more historically accurate to both people and events, there are assorted nods to particular tropes, character types and depictions from a range of media. Let's call this: a fictional representation of Robespierre and Saint-Just if, rather than being written by homophobes, he was written by a gay man.

As I am not a trained historian, and am limited to Anglophone resources and my schoolboy French, I have tried to clearly mark any places where my knowledge is particularly limited, or where I have had to make authorial choices based on conflicting information. Sometimes, I have learned new information well after writing a chapter or story, and cannot thus alter the text without substantially impacting the structure of the narrative or rewriting from scratch. I have listed these below.

For those interested, the following are the books that I have referred to most often in my writing:

General History:
Liberty or Death, Peter McPhee
The Twelve Who Ruled, R.R. Palmer
Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution, Marisa Linton
The Fall of Robespierre, Albert Mathiez
Memoirs of the Sansons, Henri Sanson

Biography:
Saint-Just: Colleague of Robespierre, Eugene Curtis
Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, Peter McPhee
Robespierre, J.M. Thompson
Fatal Purity, Ruth Scurr (not recommended, but expands helpfully on certain details at times)

Philosophy- Major Texts:
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, Epictetus
Virtue & Terror, Maximilien Robespierre (introduced by Slavoj Žižek
The Major Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, J.J. Rousseau
Fragments sur les institutions républicaines, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just

Articles/Essays:
An Essay on Patriotic Love and Self-Sacrifice, Nicholas Xenos
Robespierre (lecture), Albert Mathiez
Patriotism and Courage, Jason Scorza
All of His Power Lies in the Distaff: Robespierre, Women and the French Revolution, Noah Shusterman

Any online sources are always linked at the end of each story/chapter.

  Known Issues:

Marat's characterisation: Is absolutely incorrect in the first two stories. Part of this is genuinely my own error (research wise), and part of it reflects the starting point in the series (as I tried to decide between whether I was basing 'characterisation' on the real people, or on their representations). Either way, please be aware that it's inaccurate.
David and Marat: When I initially wrote this, everything I'd read characterised these two as friends. However, in researching David at greater depth and length, this seems questionable at this point.
Robespierre meeting the King: While I altered this scene to better reflect more accurate readings of what was meant to have happened, the entire meeting itself- as mentioned in the comments by billspilledquill- has been debunked by French historians in recent years. It continues to appear in recent Anglophone texts.

Stats:
Words:
122,420
Works:
4
Complete:
Yes
Bookmarks:
26

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