Jacques Garnier

Jacques Garnier, also called de Saintes, was born in Saintes on 30 March 1755 , and drowned in the Ohio river in 1817 or 1818) was a French politician, a lawyer and a revolutionary.

Lawyer in Saintes in 1784 , Jacques Garnier stood out from the beginning of the French Revolution by creating and chairing a committee to acquire wheat stocks and sell them at auction. He was Mayor of Saintes in 1790, general attorney of the Lower Charente, and he was elected deputy to the French National Convention by the department of Charente-Inférieure. As a member of the Jacobin Club, he aligned himself with the most radical of the Montagnards. Jacques Garnier was violent, demanding the banning in perpetuity emigres of both sexes and their execution if they return to France, claiming the Jacobins were the faction of public salvation. He maintained that Louis XVI should not be treated as accused, but as an enemy, and should be "sacrificed to security and justice." His public speeches, Hateful, often incoherent, and always lengthy, he was forbidden the podium for twenty-four hours during the Trial of Louis XVI. After voting for death, he joined the Committee of Public Safety, 25 March 1793 . His exasperated colleagues dealt with his interminable interruptions and vitriol by sending him a mission to the army of the coast of La Rochelle in late April 1793. He was therefore not involved in the elimination of Girondins .

While in Paris , August 7, 1793, he proposed to declare William Pitt as an "enemy of mankind". Responsible for organizing the revolutionary government in the Loir-et-Cher and the Sarthe in March and April 1794 , he constantly encounters his colleagues, as well as during his time in Bordeaux . Having learned the fall of Maximilien de Robespierre (9 Thermidor Year II - July 27, 1794 ), he was quick to denounce his colleague Marc Antoine Jullien as a "tool of Robespierre" but did not deny his own radical views. Inconsistently, though, he violently attacked the insurgents of the uprising of 12 Germinal Year III and the Insurrection of the 1st Prairial. He was representative of Mayenne in the Council of Five Hundred, and he endorsed the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797).

Exiled as a regicide in the Bourbon Restoration, he moved to the United States. In 1817 or 1818, Jacques Garnier and his son accidentally drowned in Ohio River when their steamboat sank.