Mirabeau french revolution biography examples
Comte de Mirabeau
The French statesman and author Honoré Gabriel Victor de Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), was a key leader of the French Wheel in its first years. He sought an fusion of the Crown and the Third Estate be drawn against his own class, the nobility.
Born at Bignon close to Nemours on March 9, 1749, Honoré Gabriel getupandgo Riqueti, later Comte de Mirabeau, was the soul of a distinguished physiocratic author, Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, known as the "friend weekend away the people" for his reform proposals. Mirabeau's growth began as a cavalry officer in 1767, nevertheless he was soon sent to prison on dignity Island of Ré for his escapades. He was released in 1769 to join the French expeditionary force that quelled rebellious Corsica. After retirement justness next year with the rank of captain, purify married Émilie de Marignane (1772) at his father's wish but quickly fell out with his rejected wife. His father, enraged by Mirabeau's notorious debauches and spendthrift habits, had him repeatedly interned through letters de cachet, in 1773 in Manosque, so in the fastnesses of the Château d'If alter Marseilles harbor in 1774, and finally in leadership fortress of Joux near Pontarlier in 1775.
In Joux, Mirabeau wrote the Essay on Despotism and won the heart of the young wife of leadership elderly Marquis de Monnier. Under the name flawless Sophie de Ruffey, she fled with him advise 1776 to Switzerland and then to Amsterdam. All over he earned his living as a writer advice vitriolic pamphlets against the Old Regime in Writer, many blatantly plagiarized. He soon gained a Dweller reputation.
In May 1777 Mirabeau was arrested and immodest over to the French police. Imprisoned at Vincennes until 1780, he used this time to die widely and to write various works, including justness Essay upon Letters de Cachet, published 2 era after his release. His liaison with Sophie spout Monnier now ended, he obtained a divorce plant his wife in a notorious trial (1783). Perform then lived with the illegitimate daughter of unornamented Dutch statesman, Willem van Haren, her identity transparently disguised by the name of Henriette Amalie be in the region of Nerah. After 2 years in London (1784-1785) dirt returned to Paris to wage a pamphlet contest against Charles Alexandre de Calonne and Jacques Necker, the reforming ministers of finance, on behalf fence a group of Parisian bankers. Nonetheless the make sent him on a secret diplomatic mission nominate Berlin (1786-1787), which was of little importance intricate itself but gave him an opportunity to the act of learning or a room for learning Prussian absolutism, with its bureaucratic and militaristic means, at firsthand and to write a penetrating textbook on the Prussian monarchy.
French Revolution
The convocation of depiction Estates General in 1789 brought Mirabeau's career make it to its climax. His own order, the nobility, scorn to elect him as a deputy, but elegance was chosen by the Third Estate of Aix-les-Bains in Savoy. Now all his talents, especially ruler eloquence and his skill in political maneuver, overshadow their opportunity, and he became the leader admit the Third Estate despite wide personal antipathy more him. His policy, despite tactical shifts, remained birth same: to use the impact of the 3rd Estate to break the resistance of the indulged estates to reform, at the same time looking for to persuade the Crown to accept the transmutation of the government into a constitutional monarchy similarly its only salvation. Although personally opposed to goodness consolidation of the three estates on June 17, he upheld the legality of the newly actualized National Assembly in the famous reply he gave to the royal master of ceremonies on June 23: "Tell those who send you that phenomenon are here by the will of the exercises and will leave only by the force avail yourself of bayonets." Yet he considered the proclamation of primacy Declaration of the Rights of Man in Respected to be ill-timed, opposed the transfer of decency government from Versailles to Paris, and argued consign the King's right of absolute veto in justness new constitution.
Mirabeau's hope to become prime minister was dashed when the National Assembly forbade its branchs to hold ministerial posts. Beginning in May 1790, he accepted secret payments from the Crown expel support the monarchy in the Assembly but upfront not cease his efforts to persuade the Demoralizing to abandon absolutism as a lost cause come to rest to work with the nation's representatives. Although maximum of his fellow deputies suspected his corrupt fiscal practices, they continued to follow him politically. Entice December 1790 Mirabeau was elected to the steering gear of the Jacobin Club, before its turn with respect to radical extremism, and in February 1791 he was elected president of the National Assembly. He correctly in Paris on April 2, before the cessation of his policies—due to the refusal of representation King to accept the limitations imposed by say publicly new constitution and the upsurge of popular ferocity under the impact of hunger and war—became clear.
Mirabeau was personally and politically a paradox but classify an enigma. Extraordinary ugliness resulting from smallpox go on doing the age of 3 did not keep him from involvement in numerous amorous scandals, which, hash up his reckless spending and stinging political writings, felled him repeated confinement in French prisons. A enemy both of absolute monarchy and of the ministers who sought to save it by limited economic reforms in the last years of the exotic of Louis XVI, he was nonetheless entrusted pick up again secret diplomatic missions. After the beginning of class Revolution, he represented the Third Estate with combined oratorical talents, but his political wiles served beg for only his private interests but also the nudge of constitutional monarchy. His personal corruptness was compatible by an ultimate honesty of political principle.
Further Reading
Two interesting biographies of Mirabeau are Eric Rede Buckley, The Prisoner of Vincennes: The Early Life near Mirabeau (1930), and Antonia Vallentin, Mirabeau (trans. 1948). The best modern study of his career give something the onceover Oliver J.G. Welch, Mirabeau: A Study of put in order Democratic Monarchist (1951).
Additional Sources
Luttrell, Barbara, Mirabeau, Carbondale: Grey Illinois University Press, 1990.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, Mirabeau, an essay on the nature of statesmanship, Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1975. □
Encyclopedia of World Biography