Maximin Isnard

Before the French Revolution

Born in 1755, he was the last son of Maximin Isnard and Anne-Thérèse Fanton. He became perfumer in Draguignan before opening a factory specializing in silk and soap.

Legislative Assembly

Isnard was quickly a revolutionary in accepting "new ideas" at the beginning of the Revolution, in 1789-1790.

On 9 September 1791, he was elected member of Legislative Assembly by the department of Var, in southeastern of France (district of Draguignan.

Isnard was linked to Brissot and sat at the left of the Assembly. He was very violent in his talks. For example, in his opinion, the French State had to deport all priests who have not accepted the Revolution.

He supported the "brissotins" who wanted a war against foreign countries, in order to strengthen Revolution.

Attacking the court, and the Austrian committee in the Tuileries, he demanded the disbandment of the king's bodyguard, and reproached Louis XVI for infidelity to the constitution. But on 20 June 1792, when the crowd invaded the palace, he was one of the deputies who went to place themselves beside the king to protect him.

Member of the National Convention

Elected to the National Convention in September 1792, he was sent to the army of the North, near Nice, to justify the insurrection ; he announced the take of Sospel and went back to Paris in autumn.

He voted for the death of Louis XVI in January 1793 and became a member of the Committee of General Security.

The committee, consisting of 25 members, proved unwieldy, and on 4 April, Isnard presented, on behalf of the Girondist majority, the report recommending a smaller committee of nine, which two days later was established as the Committee of Public Safety.

President of the National Convention (May 1793)

He was elected President of the Convention on 16 May 1793.

Isnard was presiding at the Convention when a deputation of the commune of Paris came to demand that Jacques René Hébert should be set at liberty, and he made the famous reply: "If by these insurrections, continually renewed, it should happen that the principle of national representation should suffer, I declare to you in the name of France that soon people will search the banks of the Seine to see if Paris has ever existed"

Flight

On 2 June 1793 he offered his resignation as representative of the people, but was not comprised in the decree by which the Convention determined upon the arrest of twenty-nine Girondists. On 3 October, however, his arrest was decreed along with that of several other Girondist deputies who had left the Convention and were fomenting civil war in the departments.

1794-1795

Initially proscribed during the Thermidorian Reaction, he was allowed to return to the Convention on December 4, 1794.

Seating to the Right, he became an adversary of more extremist revolutionaries.

In May 1795, he was sent to the département of Bouches-du-Rhône to uncover and prosecute fleeing Jacobins, which led him to being suspected of royalist sympathies.

1795-1797

On 13 October 1795, now regarded as a royalist, he was elected deputy for the Var to the Council of Five Hundred, where he played a very insignificant role.

In 1797 he retired to Draguignan.

End of life

In 1802, he published a pamphlet titled De l'immortalité de l'âme ("Immortality of Soul"), in which he praised Catholicism, and in 1804 another pamphlet, Réflexions relatives au sénatus-consulte du 28 floréal an XII, an enthusiastic apology for the Empire.

He was a supporter of Napoléon Ier, who named him Baron in 1813.

Upon the restoration he professed such royalist sentiments that he was not disturbed, in spite of the 1816 law proscribing members of the Convention who had voted to execute the king.

In 1825, he died in Grasse, in a deep anonymity.

See FA Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention (Paris, 2nd ed., 1906).