Jacques Pierre Brissot - Spying Allegations

Spying Allegations

One aspect of Brissot’s career that was under intense scrutiny and question, was his life after the Bastille. While enthusiasts and apologists see Brissot as an idealist, and unblemished, philosophe revolutionary, his detractors have challenged his credibility and moral character by repeating allegations that during the mid-1780s he was involved in the production and dissemination of pornographic libelles, spied for the police and or the British and defrauded his business partner. The accusations were led by Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins, Maximilian Robespierre, and above all the notorious scandal-monger, extortioner, and perjurer Charles Théveneau de Morande, whose hatred, Brissot asserted, ‘was the torment of my life’.

These have recently been backed up by the historian, Robert Darnton. They accused Brissot of being a Police Spy; saying that he was plotting against the revolution he had once stood behind. Brissot was sent to court to defend himself on many occasions from these accusations. Darnton argues that Brissot on a personal level was not in support of the Revolution, and had gone to a police station where he asked if he could be of assistance. When he was turned away, Darnton says, he proceeded to give them information. The only problem with his accusations, argues historian Fredrick Luna, is that the letters in which Darnton got his information were written fifteen years after the supposed incident. Luna argues that this could not have been the case; Brissot was noted as leaving Paris as soon as he was released from the Bastille. So if he was not in Paris, he would not have talked with the police.