Camille Desmoulins

Lucie-Simplice-Camille-Benoît Desmoulins was a lawyer when the Revolution caught him. On 12 July 1789, after Louis XVI dismissed finance minister Jacques Necker, Desmoulins gave an impassioned call to arms before the Palais-Royal; the unrest he sparked culminated in the Storming of the Bastille two days later. He became a prominent radical pamphleteer, advocating for republicanism and revolutionary violence, attacking the old regime and former allies like Jacques Pierre Brissot. His campaigns helped bring down the Girondists and usher in the Reign of Terror. But during the Terror, Desmoulins and his friend Georges Danton distanced themselves from the radical Montagnards led by Maximilien Robespierre, Desmoulins's schoolmate. Through his journal Le Vieux Cordelier he criticized the Revolutionary Government's excesses and pleaded for clemency. It enraged Robespierre. In April 1794 the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced Desmoulins to death; he was guillotined alongside Danton and other accused Dantonists on 5 April.