Bonne nouvelle !

[montagnarde1793]

So, as you may or may not already know (Did I post on this already? No time to check - class in five minutes), some descendant of Le Bas's decided to put up a bunch of documents, including some of Robespierre's manuscripts, up for auction - documents that historians didn't even know existed. There was some concern that they would be bought by a private collector or a library or archive outside of France, so there was a big campaign with newspaper articles and interviews and the Société des études robespierristes set up a public subscription (which I contributed to and which has raised more than 100,000 euros so far) to buy them.

Yesterday the auction took place, and the State bought them for nearly a million euros (they were estimated at 200,000-300,000). Of course, it's not entirely over yet, since it has 15 days to come up with the money (which will include public funds as well as the money from the subscription), but this means that those documents are headed for the Archives nationales. Which, I don't think I even need to emphasize, is excellent news.

(Here's a video on the subject if you can understand French, btw.)