Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac

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Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (September 10, 1755 - January 13, 1841) was a French politician and journalist, one of the most notorious members of the National Convention during the French Revolution.

Contents 1 Early career 2 With the Girondists and The Mountain 3 Thermidor, prison, and later life 4 References

[edit] Early career

He was born at Tarbes in Gascony. The name Barère de Vieuzac, by which he continued to call himself long after the renunciation of feudal rights on the Day of August 4, was assumed from a small fief belonging to his father, a lawyer at Vieuzac. He began to practise as a lawyer at the parlement of Toulouse in 1770, and soon earned a reputation as an orator, while his style as a writer of essays led to his election as a member of the Academy of Floral Games of Toulouse in 1788.

He married at the age of thirty, and, four years later (1789), he was elected deputy by the estates of Bigorre to the States-General, which met in May - he had made his first visit to Paris in the preceding year. Barère de Vieuzac at first belonged to the constitutional party, but he was less known as a speaker in the National Constituent Assembly than as a journalist. His paper, the Point du Jour, according to François Victor Alphonse Aulard, owed its reputation not so much to its own qualities as to the fact that the painter Jacques-Louis David, in his famous sketch of the Tennis Court Oath, showed Barère kneeling in the corner and writing a report of the proceedings for posterity.

[edit] With the Girondists and The Mountain

After the flight of the king to Varennes, Barère passed over to the republican party and the Feuillants, although he continued to keep in touch with the Duke of Orléans, to whose natural daughter, Pamela, he was tutor (Barère appears to have been committed to no particular faction). After the close of the Constituent Assembly, he was nominated one of the judges of the newly instituted Cour de cassation from October 1791 to September 1792.

In 1792 he was elected deputy to the National Convention for the département of the Hautes-Pyrénées. At first, he voted with the Girondists, attacked Maximilien Robespierre as "a pygmy who should not be set on a pedestal", and at the trial of King Louis XVI voted with The Mountain for the king's execution "without appeal and without delay". He closed his speech with a memorable sentence:

“

The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants. [1]

”

Appointed member of the Committee of Public Safety on April 7, 1793, he became involved in foreign affairs, and then joined Robespierre's faction, the Jacobin Club, playing an important part in the second Committee of Public Safety —after 17 July 1793— and voted for the death of the Girondists at the onset of the Reign of Terror. He consequently became active in the power struggles between The Mountain and others, and became one of its prominent activists.

[edit] Thermidor, prison, and later life

The start of the Thermidorian Reaction (July 27, 1794) caught Barère in hesitation, and then saw him drawing up the report outlawing Robespierre. Nonetheless, in Germinal of the year III (March 21 to April 4, 1795), the leaders of Thermidor decreed the accusation of Barère and his colleagues of the Reign of Terror, Jean Marie Collot d'Herbois and Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, and he was imprisoned on Oléron, on his way for transportation to French Guiana. He was removed to Saintes, and then escaped to Bordeaux, where he lived in concealment for several years. In 1795 he was elected member of the Directory's Council of Five Hundred, but was not allowed to take his seat.

Under the First Empire, he was used as a secret agent by Napoleon I, for whom he carried on a diplomatic correspondence. A member of the Chamber of Deputies during the Hundred Days, Barère de Vieuzac acted as a Royalist later in 1815, but, on the final restoration of the Bourbons, he was banished for life from France as a regicide, and then withdrew to Brussels.

After the July Revolution of 1830 he reappeared in France, was reduced by a series of lawsuits to extreme poverty, accepted a small pension from King Louis Philippe, and died as the last survivor of the Committee of Public Safety.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.