Antoine Barnave

Antoine Pierre Joseph Marie Barnave (1761-1793) was a French lawyer, politician, and one of the most influential orators of the early stage of the French Revolution (1789-1799). He is notable for being a champion of constitutional monarchy, and for co-founding the Feuillant Club to offset the influence of the radical Jacobins.

Eloquent and well-read, Barnave made a reputation for himself as one of the National Assembly's best speakers. A member of the Assembly's unofficial 'triumvirate', he was instrumental in some of the Revolution's earliest accomplishments. However, his refusal to back the abolition of slavery in France's colonies alienated him from his radical colleagues. As he lost influence in the Jacobin Club, he gradually became a supporter of constitutional monarchy; his efforts to increase the power of the monarchy included correspondence with Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), a correspondence that, when discovered in 1792, led to his arrest and execution the following year.

Early Career

Antoine Barnave was born on 22 October 1761 in Grenoble, in the province of Dauphiné. Born into an upper-bourgeois Protestant family, his father was an advocate of the Parlement of Dauphiné, while his mother was a highly-educated woman. When he was ten, he and his mother had to be thrown out of an empty theatre box reserved for the noble friend of the provincial governor. The incident, an act of protest on the part of Madame Barnave, had a profound impact on young Antoine, who would later say that it gave him his life purpose: "to raise the caste to which belonged from the state of humiliation to which it seemed condemned" (Doyle 26).

As a Protestant, he was not allowed to receive an education at the Catholic-run schools and was homeschooled by his mother. He was later privately tutored in law and debuted at the bar in 1781. Now a small-town lawyer, Barnave was eloquent, sociable, studious, and well-read. He excelled in the French and English languages and had a penchant for the Enlightenment-era philosophies that inspired all of France's revolutionary leaders. Not content with a quiet life in Grenoble, Barnave dreamed of either political or literary fame, longing to make his impact on the world. He would not have to wait for long.

In the summer of 1788, the French Revolution had a sort of dress rehearsal in Barnave's hometown of Grenoble. On 7 June, protests erupted in response to the Revolt of the Parlements, when King Louis XVI of France's (r. 1774-1792) chief minister Étienne Loménie de Brienne (1727-1794) attempted to break the power of the parlements after they refused to pass his edicts. When royal soldiers were sent in to crush the protests, citizens picked up stones and cobbles from the streets, climbed onto roofs, and pelted the soldiers with projectiles. Following this event, known as the Day of Tiles, Barnave sensed an opportunity to thrust himself into politics. Around this time, he wrote his first pamphlet, Spirit of the Edicts Registered by Military Force at the Parlement of Grenoble, the general thesis of which was an appeal to the king to convene an Estates-General.

He was not the only one in Grenoble to make this demand. On 14 June, an illegal assembly of the three societal orders in Grenoble gathered and decided to convoke the Estates of Dauphiné without the king's consent. The representation of the Third Estate (commoners) was to be equal in number to the combined representation of the upper two estates (clergy and nobility). The ensuing meeting took place at a nobleman's mansion of Vizille, organized by the judge Jean-Joseph Mounier (1758-1806). Mounier himself drafted the resolution, calling on the king to convene an Estates-General while asking that he restore power to the parlements and retract Brienne's edicts. Barnave, although playing a secondary role, made an impact with his oratory and energetic presence. His participation at Vizille, along with his pamphlet, thrust Barnave into fame; when Louis XVI conceded and announced the Estates-General of 1789, Barnave was the second deputy elected from his province, following Mounier.