Comte de Mirabeau

A scandalous youth

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti was born on 9 March 1749 at Le Bignon, near Nemours, the eldest surviving son of Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, an economist famous for his book L'Ami des hommes (“The Friend of Mankind”). Smallpox at the age of three left his face deeply scarred, and his father, a harsh and quarrelsome man, took against him early. After some years in the army, including the campaign in Corsica in 1769, he married Émilie de Marignane, a rich heiress from Aix, in 1772, and quickly ran up debts far beyond his means.

His father answered with lettres de cachet, the king's sealed orders that could lock a man up without trial. Confined to Manosque in 1774, then shut in the Château d'If off Marseille and in the fortress of Joux in the Jura, Mirabeau fell in love with Sophie de Monnier, the young wife of an elderly magistrate, and fled with her to Amsterdam in 1776. A court at Pontarlier sentenced him to death in his absence for abduction. Arrested in Amsterdam in May 1777, he spent three and a half years in the keep of Vincennes, where he wrote passionate letters to Sophie and a book against the very orders that held him.

Out of prison, he had the death sentence quashed in 1782, and in 1783 he pleaded his own case at Aix when his wife sued for separation. He lost, but the speech made his name as an orator. For the rest of the decade he lived by his pen, writing pamphlets on finance and politics, and in 1786 he went to Berlin on a secret mission for the French government.

The voice of the Third Estate

From Aix to the royal session of 23 June 1789

When the Estates-General were called in 1789, the nobles of Provence shut him out of their assembly on the ground that he held no fief of his own. He turned to the commoners instead. The Third Estate elected him in both Aix and Marseille, and he chose to sit for Aix: a count among commoners.

At the opening of the Estates-General at Versailles on 5 May he was already the most famous and the most distrusted deputy in the hall. He started a newspaper to report the debates; when the government banned it after two issues, he carried on under a new title, as letters to his constituents. On 20 June he swore the oath in the tennis court with the rest of the Commons.

Three days later Louis XVI held a royal session in which he annulled the Commons' decisions and ordered the three orders to meet separately. When he left, the nobles and most of the clergy followed him; the Commons stayed in their seats. The king's grand master of ceremonies, the marquis de Dreux-Brézé, came back to remind them of the order. Mirabeau answered for them.

The words were polished in the retelling, and several versions exist, but the defiance was real. That same day, on his motion, the Assembly declared its members inviolable, and four days later the king gave way and ordered the other two orders to join it.

The orator

Heavy, pock-marked, with an enormous head and a mane of hair, Mirabeau dominated the National Assembly by his voice and his presence. He did not work alone: a small team of friends, among them the Genevan Étienne Dumont, drafted many of his speeches and reports, and he made them his own at the tribune.

He wanted a revolution that kept a strong king. In September 1789 he spoke for giving the crown an absolute veto over laws; the Assembly granted only a suspensive one. On 2 November 1789, on his motion, it placed the property of the Church at the disposal of the nation. In May 1790 he fought Barnave over who should declare war and make peace, and won a compromise that left the king a share in it. He hoped to become a minister himself, and on 7 November 1789 the Assembly barred its members from the king's ministry, a vote widely seen as aimed at him. He was also the rival of Lafayette, the other man who hoped to steer the Revolution from the middle.

The court's secret adviser

In the spring of 1790, through his friend the comte de La Marck, Mirabeau made a secret bargain with the court. The king paid his debts and gave him 6,000 livres a month, with the promise of a million at the end of the Assembly's session; in return Mirabeau sent the king and queen notes of advice, some fifty in all. On 3 July 1790 he met Marie Antoinette in the park of Saint-Cloud. He urged the king to accept what the Revolution had won, to leave Paris for a provincial town rather than for the frontier, and to rally the nation against the extremists. The court read his notes and seldom followed them.

He did not think he had sold himself: he was paid, he is supposed to have said, but not sold. His public standing held. At the end of 1790 he was president of the Jacobin Club, and on 29 January 1791 the Assembly elected him its president for the usual two weeks.

Death and the Panthéon

The first great man of the Panthéon, and the first to be thrown out of it

Worn out by work, debts and pleasure, Mirabeau fell ill at the end of March 1791 and died at his house in the Chaussée-d'Antin on 2 April, aged 42. Paris went into mourning, and huge crowds followed his coffin. The Assembly decided that the new church of Sainte-Geneviève would become a Panthéon for the nation's great men, and he was the first to be laid there. Without him the court had no one left in the Assembly to argue its case; less than three months later the royal family tried to escape and was stopped at Varennes.

After the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 overthrew the monarchy, a locksmith who had worked for the king showed the minister Roland, on 20 November, an iron cupboard hidden in a wall of the palace: the armoire de fer. The king's papers inside showed that Mirabeau had been in the court's pay. The Jacobins smashed his bust, in November 1793 the Convention voted to expel him from the Panthéon, and in September 1794 his remains were carried out on the day Marat's were carried in, and buried in an unmarked grave.

Historians still argue whether he could have saved the monarchy had he lived, or whether the king would never have listened to him. He remains the Revolution's first great orator, and the first of its heroes to fall from grace.