BILLAUD-VARENNE, JEAN-NICOLAS

born April 23, 1756, La Rochelle, France died June 3, 1819, near Port-au-Prince, Haiti lawyer and pamphleteer, a member of the Committee of Public Safety that ruled Revolutionary France during the period of the Jacobin dictatorship (179394). Billaud-Varenne was the son of a lawyer of La Rochelle. After studying at the universities of Paris and of Poitiers, he taught at the Oratorian college at Juilly. In 1785 he was admitted to the bar at Paris, and by 1787 he was writing anonymous tracts attacking the French church and government. He joined the Club of the Jacobins soon after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. As a member of the revolutionary Commune, he helped plan the popular insurrection that overthrew the monarchy on Aug. 10, 1792. He was elected a deputy to the revolutionary National Convention, which convened on September 21, and, on his motion, the republic was declared the next day. Billaud-Varenne then threw himself into the struggle against the deputies of the moderate Girondin faction. The leading Girondins were expelled from the Convention on June 2, 1793, and the Jacobins took control of the Revolution. By that time Billaud-Varenne had formed close ties with the Parisian sansculottes (wage earners and shopkeepers), who looked for leadership to the left-wing Jacobins under Jacques Hbert. Billaud-Varenne's lments du rpublicanisme (1793; Elements of Republicanism) set forth such Hbertist demands as the redistribution of wealth and guaranteed employment for all workers. Taking advantage of popular unrest in Paris, the Hbertists forced the Convention to appoint Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois to the Committee of Public Safety on Sept. 6, 1793. On 14 Frimaire (Dec. 4, 1793) Billaud-Varenne secured passage of a law giving the committee absolute authority over provincial officials. Robespierre, the committee's chief spokesman, had the leading Hbertists guillotined in March 1794, and in the following month Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois forced him to eliminate Georges Danton, the leader of the Jacobins' right wing. Soon Billaud-Varenne was challenging Robespierre's leadership. Conspiring with Collot d'Herbois and other dissidents, he helped bring about Robespierre's downfall on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794). In the ensuing Thermidorian Reaction against the Jacobin regime, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois were deported to French Guiana (April 1795), where Billaud-Varenne married and became a farmer. In 1800 he turned down Napoleon Bonaparte's offer of a pardon. He made his way to New York in 1816 but settled in Haiti the following year.