Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois
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Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois (June 19, 1749 – January 8, 1796) was a French actor, dramatist, essayist, and revolutionary. He was a member of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Paris, Collot left his home in the rue St. Jacques in his teens to join the travelling theatres of provincial France. His moderately successful career as an actor, supplemented by a vigorous outpouring of works for the stage, took him from Bordeaux in the south of France to Nantes in the west and Lille in the north and even into the Dutch Republic, where he met his wife.
In 1784 he became director of the theatre in Geneva, Switzerland, and then at the prestigious playhouse at Lyon in 1787. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 he dropped everything and returned to Paris, where his lead actor's voice, his writing skills, and his ability to organise and direct large-scale fêtes (civic feasts) were to make him famous.
[edit] Activism
He contributed from the very beginning to the revolutionary agitation; but it was not until 1791 that he became a figure of importance. Then, by the publication of L'Almanach du Père Gérard, a little book advocating, in popular terms, the advantages of a constitutional monarchy, he suddenly acquired great popularity.
His renown was soon increased by his active involvement on behalf of the Swiss of the Château-Vieux Regiment, condemned to the galleys for mutiny at Nancy. Collot d'Herbois' efforts resulted in their liberation; he went himself to Brest in search of them; and a civic feast was decreed on his behalf and theirs, which gave occasion for one of the few poems published during his life by André de Chénier.
His opinions became more and more radical. Collot d'Herbois was a member of the Commune of Paris during the insurrection of August 10, 1792, and was elected deputy for Paris to the National Convention, where, on the first day of the Convention (September 21, 1792) he was the first to demand the abolition of royalty. Collot d'Herbois later voted for the death of Louis XVI "sans sursis" ("without delay").
[edit] Terror, Thermidor, and deportation
He was engaged in the struggle between the Mountain and the Girondists, and, after François Hanriot's coup d'état of May 31, 1793, he made himself conspicuous by his pursuit of the defeated Girondist party. Along with his close friend Billaud-Varenne he sat at the extreme left of the Convention, attacking speculators, and proposing egalitarian programmes. In June he was made president of the Convention; and in September he was admitted to the Committee of Public Safety, on which he was very active as a sort of general secretary.
After having entrusted him with several missions to Nice, Nevers, and Compiègne, the Convention sent him along with Joseph Fouché, on October 30, 1793, to punish the revolt of Lyon. There, he introduced the Reign of Terror in its most violent form, with mass executions, including more than a hundred priests and nuns, and beginning the dismantling of the city itself. Although acting on instructions from the Convention dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, he was exposed to the latter's accusations, which had Collot return to Paris as a suspect.
In May 1794, an attempt was made to assassinate Collot - it only increased his popularity and the animosity of Robespierre, against whom he took sides during Robespierre's downfall during the Thermidorian Reaction, when he presided over the Convention during a part of the initial session. Subsequently, Collot d'Herbois was one of the first to be accused of complicity with the fallen leader, but was acquitted. Denounced a second time, he defended himself by pleading that he had acted for the cause of the Revolution, but in March 1795 he was condemned with Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac and Billaud-Varenne to transportation to Cayenne, French Guiana, where he exerted a brief revolutionary influence before dying of yellow fever early in 1796.
[edit] Works
Beginning his literary career in 1772 with the critically-acclaimed Lucie, ou les Parents imprudents and finishing in 1792 with L'Aîné et le cadet, Collot was an accomplished, if minor, dramatist in a turbulent period of the French stage.
Before the Revolution he wrote at least fifteen plays, of which ten survive, including Lucie, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (as M. Rodomont, ou l'Amant loup-garou), and an adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El Alcalde de Zalamea (Il y a bonne justice, ou le Paysan magistrat), all three of which kept the stage throughout France for over a decade. During the first three years of the Revolution he wrote at least seven more plays, of which six survive, juggling the tearful love themes of le drame bourgeois with political themes and messages in such plays as L'Inconnu, ou le Préjugé vaincu and Socrate (on Socrates).
In 1791 he wrote the prize-winning L'Almanach de père Gérard, a fictional account of revolutionary morality which went on to become the best-seller of the period, establishing his political credentials in the process.
He is also one of the authors of the first French republican (never-applied) Constitution (1793).
[edit] References
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in turn, cites as a reference:
- F.A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention (Paris, 1885-1886), t. ii. pp. 501-512. The principal documents relative to the trial of Collot d'Herbois, Barère and Billaud-Varenne are indicated in Aulard, Recueil des actes du comité de salut public, t. i. pp. 5 and 6.
[edit] Bibliography
- Much recent study has been done on Collot d'Herbois, in Australia (specialised articles by Paul Mansfield; Peter Bruce's "Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois dans son théâtre pré-révolutionnaire") and in France (Michel Biard Collot d'Herbois. Légendes noires et révolution).
- A more easily obtainable work is R. R. Palmer's Twelve Who Ruled, which contains a biographical account of the members of the Committee of Public Safety.
- A. Kuscinski Dictionnaire des conventionnels (1916)
