Antoine Barnave - Rise, Decline, and Execution

Rise, Decline, and Execution

On the arrest of the king and the royal family during the Flight to Varennes, Barnave was one of the three appointed to conduct them back to Paris, along with Jerome Petion and the Marquis de Latour-Maubourg. During the journey, he began to feel compassion for Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Royal Family, and subsequently attempted to do what he could to alleviate their sufferings. In one of his most powerful speeches, he maintained the inviolability of the king’s person.

As the Jacobin Club grew more radically in favor of a republic, Barnave and the other members of the triumvirate separated from them to form the Feuillant party in early 1791. In the summer of 1791, July and August specifically, Barnave reached his height of political prominence after the 17 July 1791 Champ de Mars Massacre weakened the position of the Jacobins.

The Feuillants began to lose this political clout by early autmun however, a matter that was complicated by disagreements that arose with the growing influence of Jacques Pierre Brissot and his supporters, known as the Girondists. After the Feuillants opposed war against Austria and the Habsburgs, they were driven out of the Assembly. Barnave's public career came to an end, and he returned to Grenoble at the beginning of 1792. His sympathy and relations with the royal family, to whom he had submitted a plan for a counter-revolution, and his desire to check the violence of the Revolution, brought on him suspicion of treason.

He was denounced on 15 August 1792 in the Legislative Assembly, arrested and imprisoned for ten months at Grenoble, then transferred to Fort Barraux, and in November 1793 to Paris (during the Reign of Terror). On 28 November he appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was condemned for treason on the evidence of papers detailing his extensive clandestine correspondence with Queen Marie Antoinette found in the Tuileries Palace, and guillotined the next day, alongside Marguerite-Louis-François Duport-Dutertre.