Bertrand Barère

Bertrand Barère, portrait of Jean-Louis Laneuville , around 1790. Barère's signature:

Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (born September 10, 1755 in Tarbes (then part of the Bigorre province , now the capital of the Hautes-Pyrénées in the Occitanie region ); † January 15, 1841 in Tarbes) was a French revolutionary and politician who worked during the French Revolution as a member of the Hautes-Pyrénées department in the National Convention .

Life

The father Bertrand Barères was the Seneschal of Tarbes (Bigorre); he owned a small estate near Vieuzac and therefore called himself Barère de Vieuzac.

Bertrand Barère studied law in Toulouse and then became a lawyer in the parliament of the same place. He took part in the editing of the Cahiers de doléances and was elected member of the Third Estate in the Estates Assembly and later in the Constituent Assembly. He published the newspaper Le Point de Jour and was elected for the Hautes-Pyrénées department. He was also one of the founders of the Feuillants Club , but soon left it to return to the Jacobins .

As a member of the National Convention, he headed it when the trial against the king began. He went on to questioning and voted for the death penalty without delay. He fought the growing influence of the commune and called for the perpetrators of the September murders to be prosecuted .

Because of his high workload and his rhetorical talent, he was elected to the first welfare committee on April 13, 1793 . At the meeting of the National Convention on July 31, 1793, at the suggestion of Barère, it was decided to open and destroy all the royal tombs of Saint-Denis and to use the metals obtained mainly from the lead coffins for the purposes of the Revolutionary War. Barère was an enemy of Georges Danton ; he and Robert Lindet were the only ones who could assert themselves after his re-election. Barère was entrusted with foreign policy.

On the 9th Thermidor he was actively involved in the fall of Robespierre . Shortly afterwards, after being arrested and sentenced for deportation to Guyana , he managed to escape while interned on the Île d'Oléron . He had to stay underground and could only reappear after the 18th Brumaire . He offered his services to Napoleon Bonaparte , who commissioned him to compile a weekly report on public mood and opinion.

During the Restoration he went into exile in Belgium and only returned to France under Louis-Philippe . He was elected MP under the July government. He died as the last surviving member of the welfare committee.

literature

• Hippolyte Carnot (Ed.): Mémoires de Barère de Vieuzac (4 volumes, 1842–44)