Education
"Yesterday this courageous youth, surrounded by brigands, chose to perish rather than give them the two horses he was leading.".
"Yesterday this courageous youth, surrounded by brigands, chose to perish rather than give them the two horses he was leading.".
He was in fact too young to join the army but attached himself to a unit fighting counter revolutionaries in Vendéest After his death General J.-B. Desmarres gave this account, by letter, to the Convention. The boy"s death was seized on as a propaganda opportunity by Robespierre, who praised him at the Convention"s tribune saying that "only the French have thirteen-year-old heroes".
But rather than simply being killed by Breton royalists who solely wanted to steal horses, Bara was transformed into a figure who denied the Ancien Régime at the cost of death.
His remains were to be transferred to the Panthéon during a revolutionary festival in his honor but the event was cancelled when Robespierre was overthrown the day before it was to take place.