‘The Vengeance of a Province’: Alexandre Rousselin and His Accusers

From 1789 to 1793, Alexandre Rousselin (1773–1847) successively became a revolutionary, a republican, and a terrorist. After he acquired the status of nobility, he added liberal to the litany. On behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, Rousselin undertook two missions to Champagne in the fall of 1793. He brought the rigors of revolutionary government to Provins in the Seine-et-Marne and Troyes in the Aube. His actions elicited powerful responses that culminated in repeated denunciation and being jailed and freed from prison five separate times. His detractors continued to charge him with “terrorism” to sully his reputation for more than forty years. The politics of vengeance shaped Rousselin’s extraordinary revolutionary life. This chapter examines the emotional and practical ramifications of vengeance for revolutionaries across the entire Age of Revolution.