Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc

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Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc, aka Jean-Theophilus Leclerc and Theophilus Leclerc d'Oze (b. 1771 in La Cotte, near Montbrison, France; d. 1796), was a radical French revolutionist and publicist. After Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated, Leclerc assumed his mantle.

Leclerc was the son of a civil engineer, and as a young man went to Martinique from which he was expelled for revolutionary propaganda in 1791. He returned to metropolitan France and joined the 1st battalion of Morbihan.

Leclerc took an extremely radical revolutionary position. He was even expelled from the Jacobin Club for being too radical. He was a founding member of Les Enragés (literally "the Angry Ones") who opposed Jacobian leniency. In 1793, he married Pauline Léon, who together with Claire Lacombe had founded the Société des Républicaines Révolutionnaires a radical & revolutionary feminist organization which was banned the following year. He and his wife published a broadsheet called L'Ami du peuple par Leclerc starting in 1793, which advocated a radical purging of the army, the creation of a revolutionary army only made up of the partisans of the Reign of Terror, and the execution of all the suspected anti-revolutionaries. His publishing activities ceased with his arrest in April, 1794. After his release in August 1794, he and his wife maintained a low profile until his death two years later.

[edit] References

• Tulard, Jean; Fayard, Jean-François; and Fierro, Alfred (1987) Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française 1789-1799 R. Laffont, Paris, ISBN 2-221-04588-2 ;
• Lasky, Melvin J. (1989) On the Barricades and Off Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, ISBN 0-88738-726-8 ;
• Levy, Darline Gay (ed.) (1980) Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795 University of Illinois, ISBN 0-252-00855-3 ;