Comte de Mirabeau
Mirabeau dominated the early French Revolution and was taking the king's money while doing it. Born in 1749 into a Provençal noble family, disfigured by smallpox and enormous in build and appetite, he spent his youth in prisons his own father obtained warrants for — the lettres de cachet he later denounced — including three years at Vincennes for eloping with a marquise. He wrote pornography, financial pamphlets and a treatise against arbitrary imprisonment, and lived on debt and journalism. Rejected by the nobility of Provence in 1789, he stood for the third estate at Aix and was elected overwhelmingly. He was the greatest orator in the Assembly. When the royal master of ceremonies came to disperse the deputies in June 1789, it was Mirabeau who answered that they were there by the will of the people and would leave only at the point of a bayonet. His actual position was a constitutional monarchy on the English model, with strong royal executive power exercised through ministers answerable to the Assembly. He proposed exactly that and the Assembly, fearing corruption, voted instead that no deputy could become a minister — which he took as aimed at him, and which was. From May 1790 he was secretly in the pay of the court, receiving a large salary and his debts settled, and sent the king detailed advice he was also arguing publicly. He died of illness in April 1791, was buried in the Panthéon, and was removed from it when the papers were found. Had he lived, the constitutional monarchy might have had an advocate capable of defending it, which is the standing counterfactual of 1791.
- Lived: 1749 CE – 1791 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: orator, politician, nobleman
