Lucile Desmoulins (1770–1794)

Lucile Desmoulins, née Anne-Lucile-Philippe Laridon-Duplessis, was born in Paris, France, to a wealthy bourgeois family. Her parents were Claude-Étienne Laridon-Duplessis, an official in the French Ministry of Finance and Anne-Françoise-Marie Bois de Veix. She began keeping a diary as a young girl. She met Camille Desmoulins, a poor student lawyer 10 years her senior, as a teenager and fell in love. He proposed to her when she was 17. The match was initially refused by her father, but he allowed them to marry in 1790 after Camille Desmoulins had become a famous orator, activist, and journalist at the start of the French Revolution. The groom's close friend Maximilien Robespierre was a witness at the ceremony. The Desmoulins couple were inseparable companions, and Lucile worked tirelessly to assist her husband with his writing as well as writing herself. They had a son in 1792. They became the center of a circle of political leaders that included the powerful Jacobin Club. Camille started his own newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in December 1793, in which he called for freedom of the press and criticized the excesses of the Reign of Terror, siding with Robespierre's enemy and rival, Georges Danton. Desmoulins and Danton were arrested on March 30, 1794. Lucile exerted heroic efforts to secure her husband's release but in vain; he was sent to the guillotine on April 4. She was arrested the same day, separated from her baby son, and executed on April 13, aged 24. Though many of her writings were lost, her diaries from the summers of 1788 and 1789 and from June 1792 to February 1793 survived and were published in 1995 as Journal de Lucile Desmoulins. A number of French schools and streets are named for Lucile Desmoulins and or her husband.