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Rabbi Dee confirmed that he was offered the diplomatic role.
By World Israel News Staff
Bereaved husband and father Rabbi Leo Dee has been offered a position with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.
Rabbi Dee confirmed that he is in discussions regarding the position of special envoy to Jewish communities around the world.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said he was inspired by Dee’s call for unity among Israelis — made during his eulogy for his wife Lucy Dee.
Lucy, 48, and her daughters Maya and Rina – British-Israeli residents of Efrat – were driving in the Jordan Valley on a Friday afternoon when a Palestinian terrorist rammed into their car and proceeded to shoot. The sisters, 20 and 15 years old, were pronounced dead at the scene; the mother was transferred to a Jerusalem hospital in critical condition and died several days later.
“Today the Jewish people have proven that we are one, we are united,” Rabbi Dee said at his wife’s funeral, attended by an estimated 10,000 people from across the country.
“When a simple, quiet family in Efrat is devastated, the whole country hurts.And when a family in Tel Aviv is devastated, the whole country hurts. There’s no greater proof of our unity.”
Although the rabbi was experiencing intense loss, his message was a comforting one, considering that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating regularly in recent months against the new Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial reform. The protests – some of which were labeled ‘Day of Disruption,’ aimed at shutting down the country’ – included language signifying deep division in Israeli society beyond the issue of the reforms, incitement to violence and mob behavior.
In turn, approximately 600,000 people attended a pro-government demonstration in Jerusalem as well, chanting that the majority demands the reforms.
Ahead of Memorial Day for Fallen IDF Soldiers and Victims of Terror, Rabbi Dee appealed to the public not to protest at cemeteries or make political speeches and instead to stress the unity of the Jewish nation.
Earlier this month, following the capture of the two Hamas terrorists responsible for the murder of the Dee women, the rabbi praised the Israeli security forces, adding:
“If the terrorists would have been captured alive, I would have wanted to ask them why they did this. What was their vision for a better world? I asked the Shin Bet if I could speak with their families to ask them that question.”
The post Foreign Ministry offers bereaved husband and father Leo Dee position as special envoy appeared first on World Israel News.
A diesel school bus being converted into an electric school bus. (Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.
“It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with fourteen hundred people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry,” said Maria Somma, organizing director with the USW. “It’s not a single important win. It’s an example of what’s possible — workers wanting to organize and us being able to take advantage of a time and a policy that allowed them to clear a path to do so.” The high-turnout vote was 697 to 435.
At two factories and a warehouse near Macon, the workers build school buses and an array of specialty buses. Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, after Daimler Truck’s Thomas Built Buses. The United Auto Workers (UAW) represent workers at a Thomas Built facility in North Carolina.
The main issues in Georgia were pay and safety. Workers began organizing at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. They overcame a fierce anti-union campaign in a right-to-work state where only 4.4 percent of workers are union members. But Somma adds that workers tapped into local union networks. “People think the South is nonunion, but we have a lot of members in middle Georgia,” she said.
The Steelworkers represent thousands of members in the state — at BASF, which makes chemicals used in plastics, detergent, and paper manufacturing, Anchor Glass, and the paper giant Graphic Packaging International.
Despite receiving torrents of federal subsidy money that was supposed to require it to remain neutral, Blue Bird pulled out all the stops to try to beat the union.
The company received $40 million in rebates as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus program, part of $500 million handed out last year to replace diesel school buses with ones with zero or low emissions. The funds are part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed in 2021, which includes $5 billion in funding for clean buses through 2026.
In one particular egregious move, the company allegedly told workers that if they were part of a successful union drive at Blue Bird, no other employers would hire them.
These funds can’t be used to thwart union organizing, but that didn’t stop the company from campaigning against the union. The Steelworkers filed seven unfair labor charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
Among the charges for illegal union busting were polling employees on their union support, threatening to close the plant, telling workers collective bargaining was an ineffective means to settle workplace grievances, and putting up slide shows telling workers to vote against unionization.
In one particular egregious move, the company allegedly told workers that if they were part of a successful union drive at Blue Bird, no other employers would hire them. With a high churn rate, Blue Bird workers often cycle through other manufacturing employers like Frito-Lay, so the threat struck a nerve.
The company also launched a charm offensive, parking food trucks outside the warehouses and unfurling banners that read, “We Love Our Employees!”
When union-busting wallops didn’t do the trick, the company began making improvements — putting in place more predictable schedules, doling out optional overtime, and issuing company handbooks workers had never seen in all their years of employment.
The company even claimed to have patched up a leaking roof that was creating hazardous working conditions.
Most crucially, it boosted pay. “Some people got a $2 adjustment, who were already making high money; some people got eight cents,” said Somma. “And so there was no rhyme or reason to the adjustments that anybody could see.”
Pro-union provisions have been attached to federal funds in the infrastructure package, as well as the $280 billion investment in the semiconductor industry and $370 billion to combat climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. These include requirements to pay union scale wages on the construction of clean energy facilities and prohibitions against using funds to campaign against unions.
Last month, the EPA proposed its most ambitious new regulations yet for cutting pollution from vehicles by making two-thirds of new cars and trucks sold in the United States all-electric by 2032. Heavy-duty vocational vehicles like school buses have their own standards, aimed at cutting emissions in half by 2032.
Tailpipe emissions from vehicles on roads are the largest source of greenhouse gases. The United States is the second-biggest polluting country after China. Diesel-powered school buses can emit over forty toxic air contaminants, causing asthma and other respiratory issues.
But the government guardrails in the Clean School Bus Program are relatively weak. The EPA, for example, has asked recipients of federal subsidies for clean buses to disclose the benefits they provide their employees, including health insurance, paid leave, and retirement, though disclosing this information is not required.
Still, Somma said workers were able to shine a spotlight on the company’s union busting and charge it with using public money to prevent workers from exercising their rights to organize a union. “This was a campaign that was built by one-on-one conversations and by standard organizing tactics,” she said.
Where the federal policy factored in was once workers filed for a union election. “This is an employer that would have fired workers,” Somma said. “And so while they broke the law, this policy allowed us to calm the employer’s union busting down.”
The organizing spark predated all that.
Jontae Lockett, a ten-year veteran at Blue Bird, remembers the campaign’s origins when the coronavirus was ravaging the country. “We had to report to work like nothing was happening,” he said, and the company didn’t follow social distancing guidelines: “We were working on top of each other.”
Production demands were incessant — without hazard pay, another sore point — slowing down only for a week due to supply chain snags delaying part deliveries.
But the safety issues go beyond COVID. Some days, rain pours through the roof. The company has supposedly made repairs, but the problem persists. “The water is landing on electrical boxes and sockets, computers and fans,” Lockett says, and he worries about getting electrocuted in the sloshing water.
Fed up with their treatment during the pandemic and the disrespect and favoritism supervisors dished out, Lockett and his coworker Patrick Watkins began thinking about building a union.
“You see supervisors talk to a grown man like he’s a child,” Lockett said.
Fed up with their treatment during the pandemic and the disrespect and favoritism supervisors dished out, Lockett and his coworker Patrick Watkins began thinking about building a union.
They began holding weekly committee meetings at churches, parks, and the local library, eventually transitioning to Zoom. Participants grew from a handful to two dozen.
People from different production lines came together to learn about the campaign. They spread union literature and information to the two factories and a warehouse in the complex. Workers also heard from Steelworkers from union plants in other states who came to support their counterparts in Georgia.
In a series of videos posted to YouTube, Steelworkers organizer Alex Perkins interviewed former Blue Bird workers who had left the company and picked up unionized manufacturing jobs. They talked about the difference a union makes.
In one short video, Perkins interviews a former Blue Bird employee, Quenterrious Booze, a USW member at the unionized paper manufacturing giant, Graphic Packaging. He says the union job is better: the pay is much higher and the work isn’t as hard.
The videos countered company union-busting tactics.
A long list of problems spurred Blue Bird workers to unionize. One is a hated attendance point system, where showing up late dings you half a point; six accrued points at any time results in a termination. The company says that points roll off on a monthly basis if there are no absences or lateness, but workers say supervisors command inordinate levels of power, selectively applying the policy.
Paltry vacation time is another sore point. Workers earn two vacation days after working five years at the company and a week off after eight years.
Even these benefits are subject to the whims of supervisors. Lockett said favoritism runs rampant, from who gets hired to who gets their time-off requests approved.
Another complaint: unpredictable schedules. Long days on the assembly line can stretch past ten or twelve hours in the sweltering summer to meet a production quota of thirty-eight buses daily.
At the end of a shift, workers said, a supervisor would keep them on the line longer until the production quota was hit — or tell them they had to come in two hours early the next morning, making it difficult to get kids ready for school or strike a work-life balance.
One more shared grievance: unequal pay.
The hourly wage ranges from $13 for those just starting out to $25 for those with many years at the company — but ultimately, there’s no standardization, leaving pay up to the discretion of supervisors. With a decade in, Lockett is in the upper end of that range. But he finds the system unfair, echoing Teamsters and autoworkers who say lower pay and benefits for newer hires wrecks solidarity.
“We’re building these buses by hand,” said Lockett. “Nobody should be making $13 an hour.”
After Katlyn Pineda was pulled from a hotel pool in Long Island, New York, she suffered “irreversible” brain damage and passed away in May 2023. Authorities have formally charged her mother, 41-year-old Erica Baez, with the little girl’s death.
Baez had been staying with her 5-month-old son and 7-year-old daughter Katlyn at the Marriott Melville hotel property. It was an afternoon when Baez left Katlyn alone at the pool while she stopped at the bar for some food and drink. Hotel staff reportedly saw Baez leaving Katlyn unsupervised and warned her of the danger, but she ignored the warnings and went upstairs to check on her son.
After returning for a second drink, Baez allegedly saw Katlyn floating lifeless in the water. Prosecutors stated that Baez showed more concern for her phone and shoes/socks than her daughter, as she removed them before attempting to rescue her.
It appears that her alleged negligent actions towards Katlyn have come back to haunt her now that she has been indicted with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Both charges may equate to up to 15 years of prison time.
The Suffolk County District Attorney, Raymond Tierney, strongly expressed his thoughts on the matter. He said, “The alleged actions of this defendant were selfish, senseless, and heartless. We are going to do everything we can to ensure that justice is served for little Katlyn, whose short life ended too soon.”
Erica Baez’s next court date is set for May 24.
The president’s tribute to Jewish heritage featured a pledge against hate that is undermined by his DEI orders and refusal to mention the IHRA definition.
By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
For those who think what Jews need is more official recognition of their heritage, it was a great afternoon. The White House celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month was a star-studded affair with the president, the first lady and second gentleman Doug Emhoff speaking, and also featured a performance with the stars of the Broadway play “Parade,” a musical about the Leo Frank case.
The point of the show was not just to flatter Jews with an event celebrating their month, thus giving them a slice of the minority entitlement pie. Biden used it to highlight his stand against antisemitism and as a preview of an administration plan scheduled to be released later this month that will reveal a new “national strategy” to deal with the problem.
But the title of the interagency group that is working on the issue says all anyone needs to know about how serious—meaning, not at all—the administration is about fighting antisemitism. Far from coming up with a solution to a rising tide of Jew-hatred in the United States, it’s likely that this administration, more than any of its predecessors, is actually making things worse.
Biden boasted about the White House task force on “antisemitism and Islamophobia” in his remarks at the Jewish Heritage Month, saying it represented a fulfillment of his own commitment to dealing with the problem. The president claims that it was the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017 that convinced him to run for president. But while his opposition to neo-Nazis is unexceptionable, his decision to link antisemitism with Islamophobia as being two problems of equal weight is telling.
Hatred of Muslims is as repugnant as the hatred of Jews. But the decision to link the two concerns is a function of Democratic Party politics.
Though he campaigned as the moderate, sane alternative to his main primary rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, his administration has conducted itself as if it is in thrall to the Democrats’ intersectional left-wing activist base. And that is why Biden’s task force chose to lump his response to antisemitism in with one about Islamophobia.
That was, at least in part, a response to the efforts of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to get the U.S. State Department to appoint an official to monitor Islamophobia in the same way that it has one to monitor antisemitism, a post that is currently filled by historian Deborah Lipstadt.
While that request is, like the linking of the two by the White House, a seemingly anodyne gesture that recognizes a common fight against religious intolerance, it’s actually anything but. Of course, there is prejudice against Muslims in this country. But the problem is not just that Omar— a supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, an inveterate antisemite who has made headlines with her “all about the Benjamins” slur insinuating that Jews buy congressional support for Israel—has no standing to be talking about the subject. Most of what she considers Islamophobia are efforts to monitor and hold accountable radical Muslims who engage in antisemitism and support for Islamist terrorists.
It’s also based on the myth of a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims that continues to be accepted by the corporate media as fact rather than something that is largely unsupported by the data about hate crimes. In the last two decades, FBI statistics have consistently shown that Jews are the primary victims of religious bias, far outstripping those in which prejudice against Muslims is blamed.
But overblown or not, tying the two topics together is an ominous sign that whatever the White House ultimately produces about antisemitism will not be based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of the term. That’s because it mentions the demonization of Israel. And that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. So, if the White House is coming up with a response to Jew-hatred that incorporates the worldview of Omar—and the rest of the congressional squad and fellow progressive Democrats—then it’s unlikely to focus on the growing problem of left-wing antisemitism.
The whole point of Biden’s approach to antisemitism is to see it as solely a function of the threat from the extreme right, seen in Virginia, that so frightened the country with its evocation of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies, exhibited in the form of a few hundred hatemongers marching with tiki torches.
Opposing neo-Nazis is fine, but doing so takes no courage. Nor does it recognize that however vile and violent these people may be, they have no political support. That is not the case with anti-Zionists who sit in Congress and have an unfortunate amount of clout in Biden’s party and its progressive wing.
Just as important is the fact that far from setting an example of opposing the tropes of left-wing antisemitism, the Biden administration is itself a main supporter of its ideology and core beliefs.
The main source of the left’s delegitimization of Jews is the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as critical race theory (CRT) studies. DEI is a toxic force in contemporary America because by substituting the notion of equity—or equal outcomes—for equality, it maintains that equality and equal opportunity is not just attainable but also undesirable. In this way, race is seen as always trumping merit, something that works to destroy the primary method by which Jews gained acceptance in American society.
Along with the CRT belief that everyone must be primarily classified by race and ethnic group, rather than individuals, that sets up a permanent war of those who are labeled as the oppressed, and those who are designated as oppressors and beneficiaries of “white privilege.” And among those who fall into the latter categories are Jews and the State of Israel. In that way, DEI and CRT act not merely to embitter relations between the races but also grant a permission slip for antisemitism.
An administration that was serious about opposing all forms of antisemitism would have nothing to do with the likes of Omar and fellow “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Instead, they have become welcome guests at the White House and were even singled out recently for compliments by Biden.
It would also oppose efforts to impose DEI on the country. Again, Biden has taken up the cause of the woke catechism and made its promotion one of his chief priorities, forcing every government agency and department to submit its own DEI plan. That will substitute racial quotas for merit, something that always bodes ill for Jews.
It also lends legitimacy to those very forces that are pushing the hardest for BDS discrimination against Israel and its Jewish supporters. Indeed, underneath the push for official recognition of Jewish heritage is a desire to get in on the same intersectional victim racket that left-wing antisemites promote.
The sort of lip service given to the threat of antisemitism at the White House party is to be welcomed. But honoring Jewish heritage means nothing if, at the same time, the Biden administration is enabling and empowering the same forces that are seeking to legitimize left-wing antisemitism.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The post Joe Biden’s empty words about antisemitism – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.
Released Palestinian prisoner Alaa Al-A’araj, discussing the death of Islamic Jihad terrorist Khader Adnan in Israeli jail, concurs with his own mother, who said that Martyrdom is a “source of pride, but not in this way.”
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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle say they were pursued by paparazzi in a ‘near catastrophic’ car chase Tuesday night after an awards ceremony in New York City.
The post WATCH: Harry and Meghan reportedly in ‘near catastrophic’ car chase appeared first on World Israel News.
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To Versailles, an Incident in the French Revolution, (circa 1894), (circa 1902). After a painting in the Museums Sheffield collection. French women wielding scythes and banging drums march on the palace of Versailles. Thousands of women took part in the march on October 5, 1789. [Cassell and Company Ltd, London, circa 1902.] Artist Unknown. (The Print Collector / Getty Images)
In 1789, French society rose up against a corrupt feudal order. Republican fervor on the streets and in the assemblies abolished the monarchy, confiscated the church’s property, and kick-started an ambitious restructuring of constitutional and daily life.
By 1793, the Reign of Terror — the mass arrest and execution of real and imagined counterrevolutionaries — was in full swing. With Jacobin Club leader Maximilien Robespierre at the helm, the Terror ostensibly aimed to shift revolutionary zeal from the unruly streets to the orderly guillotine. Fearful for their heads, a temporary alliance of nervous elites seized an opportunity to overthrow and kill Robespierre and his allies. The so-called Thermidorian Reaction had begun.
From the moment of his execution in 1794, commentators have been relentlessly reshaping Robespierre’s legacy to fit their political purposes, and he remains an ambiguous figure today. He is by turns cast as an anti-totalitarian bogeyman, a totem against aristocratic privilege, a case study in why not to pursue elite corruption too vigorously, or an egalitarian leveler.
Robespierre’s sister Charlotte — who worked at various points as his secretary, a Jacobin emissary to the regions, and a kind of revolutionary wartime agent — took it upon herself to ensure that the egalitarian vision of Robespierre survives to this day. She survived the decades after Thermidor, joined forces with the first communists, and went on to shape future revolutions in Europe.
The Robespierre children — Maximilien, Charlotte, and Augustin — were close in age. As young adults from regional Arras, they lacked the money and social networks that guaranteed success and lived fairly modestly. Maximilien achieved success as a lawyer thanks to his talents and some generous benefactors, though his reputation as a somewhat annoying bleeding heart marked him as an outsider in the elite circles of Arras. Elected to the Estates General in 1789, Robespierre set off for Paris and plunged himself into revolutionary debate, politics, intrigue, and the Jacobin Club.
As the revolution widened its ambitions to destroy the aristocracy, Charlotte became a sort of unofficial Jacobin delegate in Arras. She organized a campaign against Barbe-Thérèse Marchand, a bourgeois newspaper owner in the city. Marchand’s Affiches d’Artois supported exiled aristocrats and clergy; she had also successfully bankrolled the election of a conservative Girondin candidate from Arras serving in the newly formed Legislative Assembly. Charlotte’s campaign culminated in a large rally in 1791 outside Marchand’s home in defense of the revolution. Affiches d’Artois ridiculed the demonstration for including theater ushers and laundrywomen. Less than a year later, Marchand’s delegate in Paris was attacked as a closet royalist by a sansculotte crowd, and Marchand herself fled France.
Buoyed by the success of the revolutionary project, Charlotte moved to Paris. She lived on and off with her brothers, both now elected to the National Convention. She participated in meetings and discussions with some of the most prominent figures of the revolution. These included Joseph Fouché, whose courtship of Charlotte ended when the Robespierres lambasted him for committing bloody and indiscriminate massacres in Lyon. In 1793 she was sent on a mission with her brother Augustin to help suppress a Federalist revolt in Nice. Physically attacked by Girondins and under extreme pressure, Charlotte had a ferocious falling out with Augustin. She ultimately returned to Paris on her own.
In 1794 Robespierre’s enemies orchestrated their coup against him. After fierce fighting, Maximilien and Augustin were executed. Charlotte was beaten by soldiers and arrested. Her female cellmate, who Charlotte later realized was probably a Thermidorian agent, convinced her to sign a document she never read — presumably a denunciation of her brothers. Charlotte was released from prison and sought refuge with her few remaining supporters.
The next forty years would see a range of regimes in power. But whether France was under the leadership of the Directory, Napoleon Bonaparte, or the Bourbon Restoration, one theme remained constant: Robespierre was a dirty word.
Maximilien was denounced by all and sundry. He became a symbol for all the excesses of the revolution, regardless of his involvement with them. Some of the accusations were true enough — it is undeniable he advocated for the Terror — but others were pure imagination.
More sophisticated character assassinations, such as those by Madame de Staël, accused Robespierre of demagogically rendering himself a conduit for the crazed passions of the mob. But it was far more normal for Robespierre to simply be depicted as an intrinsically cruel, bloodthirsty, and ambitious monster.
There were also allegations of decadence, immorality, and corruption. The Girondin Comtesse de Genlis, whose brother had been executed during the Terror, accused Robespierre of impropriety when interrogating women. Rumors circulated that he had kept King Louis XVI’s daughter imprisoned in Temple Tower with the intention of marrying her. Robespierre’s supposed “royal ambition” was not an entirely new theme. When Charlotte had gone on her mission to Nice, she had been accused by Federalists of riding her horse around the city like a princess.
Charlotte had been there when her brother castigated people like Joseph Fouché and Jean-Paul Marat for their counterproductive, pointless violence. And she had lived with him when a stream of smiling, gift-bearing Girondin assassins — including the teenage Cécile Renault — knocked at their door over a period of months trying to murder him. These same people and factions now sat in power. They performatively wrung their hands at the very thought of violence and blamed Robespierre for many of their own crimes.
Charlotte was in no position to protest this emerging “black legend.” Despite accusations that the Robespierres had royal designs, revolutionary activity hurt the family finances badly. Charlotte, the only survivor, remained destitute and more or less in hiding. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Consulate, and later the Bourbon Restoration, effectively bought her silence by offering her a modest (and gradually diminishing) pension.
In 1830, a widely circulating fake memoir supposedly written by Maximilien Robespierre alleged that her brother had been planning to have Charlotte guillotined. This final humiliation, from a regime headed by the brother of the king she had helped depose, forced her hand.
Following the initial Thermidorian Reaction in 1794, the journalist François-Noël Babeuf emerged as leader of the far left of the revolutionary movement. In the context of the Directory’s clumsy attempt to remove price controls on food, Babeuf’s espousal of economic egalitarianism and the abolition of private property grew in popularity. The Directory moved against Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals when regiments of police and soldiers began to join, and executed him in 1797. But Babeuf’s followers, including coconspirator Philippe Buonarroti, continued to develop and propagate his ideas.
By the late Bourbon Restoration, these ideas had well and truly morphed into a proto-communist tendency. In 1828 Buonarroti published History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality. That same year, a young schoolteacher named Albert Laponneraye moved to Paris and was swept up in this school of thought. He was a critical admirer of Robespierre and wrote an article in 1830 condemning the Robespierre memoir forgery.
Charlotte had also written publicly in protest against the forgery and spied her chance. The two connected and engaged in a yearslong fruitful and comradely dialogue on Robespierre and contemporary politics. Charlotte provided Laponneraye with many letters and documents she had hidden from the authorities. In between his own writing and stints in prison for revolutionary activity, Laponneraye published Maximilien’s Oeuvres Choisies as well as Charlotte’s own Memoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères.
Laponneraye clearly respected the intellect and skills of the women around him. His sister, Zoé, was also a writer who later worked with him as a publisher at La Voix du Peuple. It is clear from moments in Zoé’s novella Samarite — a quasi-gothic bildungsroman about a suicidal youth who morphs into a satanic bourgeois — that questioning women’s oppression was a standard feature in the social circles of their readership. Nevertheless, this openness to women’s political participation didn’t totally eradicate backwards ideas about “natural roles.” Laponneraye compared Charlotte favorably to the Girondin Madame Roland, for example, on the basis that la soeur Robespierre did not fancy herself a stateswoman.
Such humility is not overly evident in Charlotte’s own writing however. In her public letter condemning the fake memoir, she analogizes her situation to that of Cornelia, mother of the Ancient Roman Gracchi brothers. In Plutarch’s telling, Cornelia is a cunning participant in the brothers’ rise to power and a behind-the-scenes legislator. French revolutionaries in the 1790s had nicknamed Babeuf “Gracchus” after the brothers; the neo-Babouvists saw the Gracchi brothers as early socialists. Charlotte’s allusion suggests she both saw herself as a kind of stateswoman and was happy to openly associate her name with the emergent communist wing of the revolutionary spirit.
When Charlotte died in 1834, Laponneraye was in prison for writing his seditious Lettres aux Prolétaires. A friend attended and read the eulogy he had written for her.
While Charlotte vociferously defended her brother’s personal integrity in her memoir, she is not particularly hagiographic about his political legacy, and asks readers to use their own judgement on the question. Laponneraye’s admiration for Robespierre was similarly circumspect. In his History of the French Revolution (1838), he declares that “those who make half-revolutions dig themselves a grave”:
The Montagnards dug theirs by not breaking the industrial helotism of the worker. . . . How did these prodigious men, who fought with such indomitable energy and audacity against a united Europe, and against the relentless plots of the aristocracy, recoil in horror before a reorganization of work and a reshuffle of property? This was their greatest fault. . . . It is from this serious fault that all the misfortunes that have weighed down on France for half a century have flowed. Perhaps we have the right to show ourselves severe before the Montagnards, for in politics faults are crimes.
The crises that would beset France over the next ten years would culminate in the Europe-wide Revolutions of 1848. A young Karl Marx was in Paris at the time. There was a gulf between his conception of social revolution and the Babouvists’. Yet on the eve of revolution, Marx addressed the Society of the Rights of Man — of which Laponneraye was an affiliate — and skillfully declared, “I want to march in the shadow of the Great Robespierre.”
In her final years Charlotte made a conscious choice to attach her brother’s legacy to the growing specter haunting Europe. Her former suitor-turned-enemy Joseph Fouché veered increasingly right over the period in an effort to save his own skin; he spent his twilight years prosecuting the White Terror as the king’s police minister. By contrast, Charlotte’s is a fine example that, even amid the rising tides of reaction, one can still choose to side with the people.