Brissot, JEAN PIERRE

Brissot, JEAN PIERRE, one of the leaders of the French Revolution in its early stage, and afterwards numbered among its victims, was born at Chartres in 1754, and educated for the bar. After completing his studies at Paris, he went into the office of a procurator, but quickly abandoned the legal profession for the more congenial one of authorship. From his earliest years he had devoted himself with passionate eagerness to literary studies, especially history, economy, and politics. His first work, Théorie des Lois Criminelles (1780), gained the approbation of the best judges, and was followed by his Bibliothèque des Lois Criminelles, which established his reputation as a jurist. He was imprisoned in the Bastille on the false charge of having written a brochure against the queen; but after four months was liberated through the intervention of the Duke of Orleans. His love of freedom again involved him in danger, and to escape from a new term in the Bastille he retired to England. He afterwards visited North America as representative of the Société des Amis des Noirs. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 he returned to France, and was elected by the citizens of Paris their representative in the National Assembly, where he exercised a predominant influence over all the early movements of the Revolution. He also established a journal called Le Patriote Français, which became the recognised organ of the earliest Republicans. As the Revolution proceeded, Brissot was recognised as the head of the party usually called Girondists (q.v.), from Gironde, the province to which most of them belonged, but also named Brissotins after their leader. Brissot contributed powerfully to the fall of the French monarchy, and strongly enjoined war against Austria and England, and the diffusion of republican principles throughout Europe. In the Convention, his moderation made him suspected as a friend of royalty, as he opposed the 'men of September' and the trial and condemnation of the king. When Louis XVI. heard his doom pronounced, he exclaimed: 'I believed that Brissot would have saved me!' But Brissot was weak enough to imagine that the best way to save the king would be to vote first for his death, and then appeal to the nation. Brissot and his party, perhaps the purest in principle and the weakest in action, ultimately fell before the fierce accusations of the Mountain or Jacobin party, which believed, or at least pretended to believe, that the virtuous Brissot had received money from the court to employ against the Revolution. With twenty other Girondists, Brissot was guillotined, October 31, 1793. See his Mémoires (L'Esprit des Enfans, ed. by Lescure, 1885).