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Letter from Arthur Dillon

This letter was written by Arthur Dillon to his friend, Camille Desmoulins, from prison. Arthur Dillon was an English aristocrat who inherited leadership of a French army regiment in the American and French Revolutionary Wars. Camille Desmoulins, a journalist and politician, played an important role in the French Revolution during the Ancien Régime. In his letter, Arthur Dillon goes through the events which led to his arrest and explains his side of the story. He adds that he wasn’t given a chance to defend himself and claims that the Comité rejected his proposal to face his accusers. The letter was written during a period of the French Revolution known as the Terror which lasted from June 1793 to the end of July 1794, during resulting in 16,594 official death sentences in France.

LETTER

FROM ARTHUR DILLON,

TO CAMILLE DESMOULINS.

Prison of City Hall, July 8.

Translated by Allison Stoch and Lynnea Wolfe

I do not know, Camille, what you have been told, & the rumors that circulated about my arrest, which is the work of the Comité de Salut public of the National Convention¹ where I have personal enemies. I believe I have appreciated your heart all too well not to be certain that you have taken steps on my behalf. Since I have been imprisoned in a high security jail for eight days now, I imagine that they will have depicted this persecution, to those who are interested in me, as being necessary for the public good, hence the necessity of secrecy in a matter of such great importance. So Camille, I give up on your friendship, on the friendship of those who love me, on the esteem of patriots, if one can prove that I am wrong in the slightest. The only fact that can concern me is that some madman, whom I barely knew, whom I did not see three times in my entire life, had told me one morning of projects as silly as they were extravagant. I silenced him,

1. Comité de Salut public of the National Convention was initially established in 1793 as the executive government in France during The Terror, a particularly barbarous period of the French Revolution. -TRANS.

& never saw him again. When asked if I knew him, I recounted with the truthfulness and loyalty that you have always seen in me, all that I knew. All the papers I owned were turned over so they could be examined by administrators. If, though there were many, one found there a single suspicious line, I would accept the harshest of treatments. On the contrary, one must have seen there in the different memoirs & projects, a man whose knowledge of military things was used only for the well-being of his country. I am being advised to have patience. The administrators whom I can only praise, for using the most honest behaviors despite the severity of their moral duty, seem convinced that there is nothing there to reproach me, & left me to think that everything depended on the Comité du Salut Public. I was assured that the Mayor requested in vain that the Comité took care of me. I suggested that by asking to see known patriots, such as you, Drouet & Chabot, the public matter would not suffer even if I were guilty; which you were just as entitled, & maybe more so, to the trust of the nation, than the members of this Comité. They rejected my request. I requested to be brought face to face with my accusers, if there were any, they refused as well. To be judged by the Police, by the Revolutionary Court, they refused as well. It is up to your judgement to dictate the steps you should take. My only wish is that the patriots of the Convention can know of my affair; if I have done the slightest wrong, I agree they should abandon me.

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