André Jeanbon Saint-André

French First Republic state institutions Jacobins and French revolutionary radicals 1749–1813 ○ Died of typhus

Former Protestant pastor and Montagnard who rebuilt the navy for the Committee of Public Safety

Born in Montauban in 1749 to a Protestant family, he was a merchant-marine captain before becoming a pastor. At the start of the Revolution he led the Society of Friends of the Constitution in Montauban; as a deputy in the National Convention he sat with the Mountain, voted for the death of Louis XVI and in November 1792 became president of the Jacobins. He entered the Committee of Public Safety in June 1793, took charge of the navy and, based at Brest, purged royalist officers and rebuilt the fleet. In February 1794 he proposed, for the committee, the vertical tricolour as the naval flag. Arrested in 1795 and amnestied, he became consul at Algiers and Smyrna and was held prisoner by the Ottoman Empire for three years. From 1801 he served in the Rhineland departments, from 1802 as prefect of Mont-Tonnerre at Mainz, where he died of typhus in 1813.