Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau

French politician

• Born: March 9, 1749
• Birthplace: The Estate of Mirabeau, Bignon, near Nemours, France
• Died: April 2, 1791
• Place of death: Paris, France

Mirabeau was a bridge between the aristocracy and the people, as well as between the variously named legislatures and the king. He led the fight to establish the national assembly out of the Estates-General and to save the monarchy as one of the two agents of the people in the French government.

Early Life

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (kohnt duh mee-rah-boh), was christened Gabriel-Honoré and called Gabriel in the family. Many of his works were first published anonymously, and he seldom used his title. In the legislature, he was mostly referred to as Mirabeau and sometimes as “the Tribune of the People.”

The Riquetis have been traced to the small town of Digne, near Marseilles. Family members accumulated wealth in Marseilles through commerce. Mirabeau’s father, Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, eager to increase the family estate and to ensure a long and distinguished family line, sought and finally found an heiress with great financial potential, Marie-Geneviève de Vassan, who was sixteen years old at their marriage in 1743. In six years, she produced two daughters and a son who died in an accident. The marquis was overjoyed when his son and heir, the comte de Mirabeau, was born, but he was immediately appalled to see the child’s huge head, two teeth, misshapen foot, and malformed tongue. That harsh blow was intensified three years later, when the child was struck by smallpox.

As the young count grew, he seemed more and more to resemble the Vassan side of the family, which his father came more and more to detest. The birth of two normal children, who resembled the Mirabeau side of the family, worsened the situation. Nevertheless, the marquis, who bravely pursued his wife’s fortune, devoted himself to saving his son and heir. The marquis gave his son an excellent tutor and three years of study with the famed Abbé Choquard in Paris and found for him a position in the regiment of the Marquis de Lambert in 1768.

When the young Mirabeau quarreled with Lambert and fled, his father saved his son with the first of many personal orders of the king. These orders, or lettres de cachet, permitted imprisonment without a (possibly humiliating) public trial. He was released to join an expedition to Corsica, which France had purchased from Genoa and which, under the famed Pasquale Paoli, was in revolt. Mirabeau served with distinction. Returning home in 1770, he spent time occupied with various projects on family estates. He married Marie-Marguerite-Émilie de Covet de Marignane on June 23, 1772.

Life’s Work

Mirabeau’s career began with bankruptcy, for which he was jailed under another lettre de cachet. While in prison, he met and fell in love with Marie-Thérèse-Richard de Ruffey, the Marquise de Monnier, a married woman. Mirabeau escaped from prison, and the couple fled the country; Mirabeau was eventually arrested in the Netherlands and imprisoned under yet another lettre de cachet.

During this period of about ten years, Mirabeau wrote his most important works. His Essai sur le despotisme (1775; essay on despotism) eloquently advocated representative government and a strong executive through the monarchy, but opposed an upper chamber of aristocrats. The essay revealed a knowledge of history and contributed to the later view of Mirabeau as an authority on government and an advocate of the people. Des lettres de cachet et des prisons d’état (wr. 1777, pb. 1780; of lettres de cachet and of state prisons) was a more technical work, ranging over French constitutional history and developing the theme that personal liberty is the liberty essential to all other liberties. Thus, not even the national interest should be invoked to violate it. This work, with impressive citations, considering Mirabeau’s confinement, came to be admired in England and contributed to the growing conviction in France that the monarchy needed restraint.

Mirabeau managed to write many other works and letters while in prison, although he complained that his paper was rationed. He wrote a French grammar and a work on mythology for the Marquise de Monnier (who gave birth to his only child, Sophie-Gabrielle, while he was in prison), a study on inoculation, and several translations. He was passionate and ambitious and, like the philosophes, confident of reason, law, and virtue. He supported the American colonists and detested the Church.

If prison served as a graduate school for Mirabeau, it was in court cases in 1782 and 1783 that Mirabeau realized his vocation, or at least his greatest talent—moving people through the spoken word. Two cases received wide public attention. In 1782, he won cases of the government against him. In 1783, he defended himself against suits brought by his wife’s wealthy family in Aix-en-Provence. He lost the judgments and the acceptance of his own class, but he won the hearts of the people with his oratory. Six years later, the people would remember and elect him overwhelmingly as a deputy of the Third Estate (Commons).

During the next several years, Mirabeau had a mistress (Henrietta-Amélie de Nehra, who had a good influence on him), traveled to England, and adopted a son, Lucas de Montigny. Mirabeau was not successful in England. Returning to France in March, 1785, Mirabeau fought off his debts by writing pamphlets for speculators on the Paris Bourse, including famous persons such as Étienne Clavière, who was later minister of finance; Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who was later chairman of the finance committee of the national assembly; and Talleyrand, then Abbé Périgord, who was later to serve every revolutionary government. Mirabeau also antagonized other famous persons such as Jacques Necker, who was a three-time finance minister, and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a playwright.

Mirabeau’s attempts at employment as secretary of the Assembly of Notables, a blue-ribbon panel called by the king at the request of his finance minister to endorse his package of fiscal reforms, failed. The 144 notables refused to endorse any reforms, and the minister was dismissed and replaced by a minister who prepared a similar reform package. This reform package was signed by the king and placed before the law courts, which refused it on the grounds that, by taxing privileged classes, the reforms violated the constitution and so could be approved only by the Estates-General representing the three social classes. The Estates-General, however, had three votes, and the two privileged classes expected to defend their interests by a two-to-one vote. The issue from May 4 through July 15 was the revolution of the three-vote Estates-General into the one-man-one-vote national assembly. Mirabeau led this struggle, although he was absent when the Bastille was captured on July 14, because of his father’s funeral. When the deputies had been ordered to disperse on June 23, Mirabeau had responded, “go tell the king that we are here by the will of the people and we will leave only by the points of bayonets.”

After the king canceled troop movements and accepted the national assembly, the problem was to control the assembly. Mirabeau sought to do that with a responsible ministry. The assembly, however, would not go along with him, even though he proposed that he himself be excluded from that ministry. Next, Mirabeau attempted an alliance with the Crown, and there were tortuous negotiations through the summer of 1790. Mirabeau was rejected by the court and attempted personal control of the assembly. He became president of the Jacobin Club on November 30 and president of the national assembly on January 29, 1791, and he was widely praised for his leadership. Then his health failed. His last speech, on March 27, was as fierce as ever. He then took to his bed and died on April 2, 1791.

Significance

After the comte de Mirabeau’s death, a leading centrist (liberal monarchist) of the assembly, Pierre-Victor Malouet, said of Mirabeau, “his death, like his life, was public misfortune.” Generally regarded as scandalous, his past may have been a handicap in relationships with others, but Mirabeau showed no regrets. He devoted the last week of his life to the preparation of his papers. All Paris and the government showed affection for him at his death. His personal life, including the prison time, the court cases, and the voluminous writings, justified his claim to being “the Tribune of the People” and caused him to appear as a lonely combatant standing against the establishment. He could intimidate both the Left and the Right and was correct in perceiving more threat to his objectives from the Left than from the Right. Jean-Sylvain Bailly said, “it cannot be denied that Mirabeau was the moving force in the National Assembly. . . . Whatever may have been his moral character, when he was aroused by some eventuality, his mind became ennobled and refined, and his genius then rose to the heights of courage and virtue.”

The history of the national assembly through March 28, 1791, can be traced in Mirabeau’s speeches. Called a politician without a party, he was also a minister without a king, an officer without an army, and a teacher without a class. Experience has since confirmed the value of his emphasis on personal liberty and on balance between the executive and the legislature. Yet, after Mirabeau, there were still the Marquis de Lafayette, Talleyrand, and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès; the constitution was completed; and the legislative assembly (1791-1792) did function and was terminated only in war panic. Whether constitutional monarchy was a necessary failure in the construction of a responsible and stable government or a tragic failure augmenting the bloodshed, no one saw better than Mirabeau the potential advantages and the dangers of the executive and the legislature. Scholars disagree on Mirabeau’s personal ambition and venality, although his motion to exclude himself from the ministry seems sincere; few had more faith than did Mirabeau in nation, law, and king.

Bibliography

Aulard, Alphonse. The Revolution Under the Monarchy, 1789-1792. Vol. 1 in The French Revolution: A Political History, 1789-1804. Translated with a preface by Bernard Miall. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Aulard was biased toward democracy and republicanism but recoiled from the excesses of both. Contains a full chronology.

Connelly, Owen. French Revolution: Napoleonic Era. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979. Chapters 2 and 3 describe Mirabeau’s period in the revolution, while later chapters recount succeeding events. Connelly is a Napoleonic scholar, and in this book politicians do not loom as large as in more political surveys. The treatment of Mirabeau and other politicians is clear and reasonable.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. Mirabeau’s life and political career are prominently featured in this historical narrative aimed at readers unfamiliar with French history.

Higgins, Earl L., ed. and trans. The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. Contains extracts of Mirabeau’s speeches on the veto and the exclusion of ministers, as well as several contemporary views of Mirabeau.

Luttrell, Barbara. Mirabeau. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. An updated biography recounting Mirabeau’s life and political career.

Nezelof, Pierre. Mirabeau: Lover and Statesman. Translated by Warre Bradley Wells. London: Robert Hale, 1937. One of the best of many older works on Mirabeau, this book reads like a novel, with much conversation and drama. An easy introduction to Mirabeau.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1989. Mirabeau’s political career is included in this lengthy chronicle of the French Revolution. Schama argues that the revolution did not produce a “culture of citizenship” and that the regime of Louis XVI was a more vital and inventive time for France than the period succeeding it.

Welch, Oliver J. Mirabeau: A Study of a Democratic Monarchist. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968. The best biography in English. Based on original sources, this study handles the sensationalism prudently and struggles through Mirabeau’s controversial career to craft a sympathetic and reasonable judgment.