Jean Antoine Rossignol

French First Republic state institutions Jacobins and French revolutionary radicals 1759–1802 → Died in deportation

Faubourg Saint-Antoine goldsmith who stormed the Bastille and, as a sans-culotte general, commanded the Army of the West in the Vendée

A goldsmith born in 1759 to a poor family of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, he stormed the Bastille in 1789, helped prepare the rising of 10 August 1792 and sat on the general council of the insurrectionary Commune. Sent to the Vendée in 1793 as a lieutenant-colonel of gendarmerie, he became commander of the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle in July under Ronsin’s protection. Dismissed in August for looting and incompetence, he was reinstated by the Convention and defended at the Jacobin Club by Robespierre and Hébert in September. In November he also took over the Army of the West and the Armies of the Coasts of Brest and Cherbourg, losing them after the defeat at Dol. Dismissed in April 1794 and imprisoned after Thermidor, he was implicated in Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals but acquitted. Deported with other Jacobins in 1801, he died of disease on Anjouan in the Comoros in 1802.