Jacques Pierre Brissot - Arrest and Execution

Arrest and Execution

The Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition, remarked that:

Of the Girondists, Vergniaud was the better orator, but Brissot was quick, eager, impetuous, and a man of wide knowledge. However, he was indecisive, and not qualified to struggle against the fierce energies roused by the events of the Revolution.

Brissot’s stance on the King’s execution, the war with Austria and his moderate views on the Revolution inevitably led to intense friction between the Girondins and Montagnards as well as the Sans-culottes. Brissot attempted to rein in the violence and excesses of the Revolution by calling for the reinstatement of the constitutional monarchy that had been established by the Constitution of 1791, a ploy which landed on deaf ears. In late May of 1793, the Montagnards in the Convention, meeting in the Tuileries Palace, called for the removal of the Commission of Twelve. The Convention was further radicalized by the call for the removal and arrest of Brissot and the entire Girondin party made by the Sans-culottes in the Parisian National Guard, which had surrounded the Convention, armed with cannons. When the refusal of the Convention to make such a hasty decision was delivered to the National Guard, Hanriot, it leader, replied:

Tell your fucking president that he and his Assembly are fucked, and that if within one hour he doesn’t deliver to me the Twenty-two, I’m going to blast it!

With this threat of violence, the Convention voted, and on 2 June 1793, Brissot along with twenty-eight other members were arrested. Brissot was one of the first Girondin to try and make escape, but was also one of the first captured. First passing through his hometown of Chartres on his way to the city of Caen, the center of anti-revolutionary forces in Normandy, he was caught traveling with false papers on the 10th of June, and was taken back to the Paris. On the 3 of October, the trial of Brissot and the Girondins began. They were charged with being “agents of the counter-revolution and of the foreign powers, especially Britain.” Brissot, who personally defended himself, brought up point by point the absurdities of the charges against he and his fellow Girondins. Regardless of their efforts, on the 30 of October the death sentence was delivered to Brissot and the other twenty-one Girondins. The very next day, the convicted men were taken by tumbrel to the guillotine, along the way singing La Marseillaise, embracing the role of martyred patriots. Jacques Peirre Brissot died by the guillotine at the age of thirty-nine, and his corpse was disposed of in the Madeleine Cemetery.