Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne

French First Republic state institutions Jacobins and French revolutionary radicals 1756–1819 → Died in exile

Montagnard who drove the centralising laws of the Terror on the Committee of Public Safety and was deported to Guiana after Thermidor

Born in La Rochelle in 1756, he became a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris and in early 1789 published a work attacking ministerial despotism. From 1790 he was one of the most violent anti-royalist orators of the Jacobin Club, and after the flight to Varennes he demanded a republic. As a deputy for Paris in the National Convention he voted for the death of Louis XVI, and in September 1793 he entered the Committee of Public Safety together with Collot d'Herbois. In December that year he proposed the Law of 14 Frimaire, which concentrated authority in the committee and gave the Terror its administrative framework. He broke with Robespierre in 1794 and led the move that overthrew him on 9 Thermidor, but in 1795 he was deported to French Guiana without trial. He refused the pardon offered by the Consulate, moved to Haiti in 1816 and died in Port-au-Prince in 1819.