(J. P.), acted so conspicuous a part in the French revolution, that a fair detail of the principal events of his life would undoubtedly be acceptable to all our readers. A fair detail, however, of such a life, we believe it impossible at present to give; for characters like Brissot's are almost always misrepresented both by their friends and by their enemies; and till the troubles which they have excited, or in which they have been engaged, have long subsided, the impartial truth is nowhere to be found.
In a fulsome panegyric, under the denomination of The Life of J. P. Brissot, said to be written by himself, we are told, that he was born January 14, 1754; and that his father was a traiteur, or "the keeper of an eating-house," but in what place we are not informed. Our author, however, affirms us, that the old man was in easy circumstances, and that he employed all the means resulting from them to give to his numerous family a good education. The subject of this memoir was intended for the bar; but not relishing the studies necessary to fit him for the profession of the law, or, if we choose to believe him, having a mind too pure and upright for the study of chicane, he relinquished the pursuit after five years of drudgery!
To relieve his weariness and disgust, he applied himself, he says, to literature and the sciences. The study of the languages was above all others his favourite pursuit. Chance brought him acquainted with two Englishmen on their travels through France; he learned their language; and this circumstance, he tells us, decided his fate.
"It was at the commencement of my passion for that language (continues he) that I made the metamorphosis of a diphthong in my name, which has since been imputed to me as so licentious a crime. Born the thirteenth child of my family, and the second of my brothers in it, I bore, for the sake of distinction, according to the custom of Beauce, the name of a village in which my father possessed some landed property. This village was called Quareville, and Quareville became the name by which I was known in my own country. A fancy struck me that I would cast an English air upon my name; and accordingly I substituted, in the place of the French diphthong ow, the ow of the English, which has precisely the same sound." For this puerile affectation, which was certainly not criminal, he justifies himself by the example of the literati of the 16th and 17th centuries, who made no scruple of crucifying and Latinizing their appellatives.
Having prosecuted his studies for two years, he had an application from the English proprietor of a paper then much in circulation, and intitled Le Courrier de l'Europe. This man having drawn upon himself an attack from government, felt and yielded to the necessity of printing his paper at Boulogne-sur-mer. It was his wish to render it interesting to the French in the department of miscellaneous intelligence; which he therefore wished to submit to the superintendency and arrangement of Brissot, who represents himself as for some moments hesitating. The profession of a journalist, subject to a licencier, was repugnant to his principles; yet it secured his independence, and put into his power the means of prosecuting an investigation of constitutions and of the sciences. After some ridiculous reclamations from the original editors of Bayle, Pufall, and Rouffou, he at last accepted of the employment, and became enamoured of it, "because (says he) it enabled me to serve talents and virtue, and, as it were, to inoculate the French with the principles of the English constitution."
This employment, however, did not last for any length of time. The plan of the proprietor of the Courrier was overthrown by administration, and Brissot quitted Boulogne to return to his first studies. Having informed us of this fact, he makes an extravagant pretence to unfilled virtue, and calls upon the inhabitants of the city which he had left to bear witness, not only that he had no vices, but that he had not even the seeds of any one of the vices which his adversaries, it seems, had laid to his charge.
"Doubtless (says he), too eager to publish my ideas, I conceived that the proper moment had arrived, and I felt an inclination to commence with an important work. Revolting from the very instant of my beginning to reflect against religious and political tyranny, I solemnly protested, that thenceforward I would consecrate my whole life to their extirpation. Religious tyranny had fallen under the redoubled strokes of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Diderot, and of D'Alembert. It became necessary to attack the second; and this was a task which the vanity of Brisot led him to consider as reserved for him.
What Voltaire and his friends meant by religious tyranny, and how they conducted their attacks against it, are matters, alas! too well known to all Europe; and as our author chose these philosophers for his guides, we might infer, without much degree of mistake, what he undertook by political tyranny, and by what means he meditated its extirpation. But he has not left us to make this discovery by inference.
"It became necessary (says he) to break in pieces the political idol, which, under the name of monarchy, practised the most violent despotism; but to attack it openly, was to expose the assailant without the possibility of serving mankind. It was by a side blow that it was to be wounded most effectually;" and therefore he resolved to begin his operations by attacking some of those abuses which might be reformed without apparently shaking the authority of the prince.
Our readers, at least the sober part of them, will probably think, that this mode of attack is not peculiar to Brisot, but that it has been practised, or attempted to be put in practice, by aspiring demagogues in all ages and countries, who have uniformly begun their career of innovation by exciting the public mind against those abuses in government, of which the existence cannot wholly be denied. The subject to which our author thought fit to call the attention of his countrymen, was the criminal jurisprudence: a subject, says he, which, with the exception of some particulars that had been successfully investigated by Beccaria and Servan, no writer had thoroughly considered in a philosophical point of view. Thinking himself fully equal to this task, he drew up a general plan; and in the year 1780 published his Theory of Criminal Laws, in two vols 8vo. This work, favourably received by foreigners, applauded by some journalists, and pulled to pieces by others, procured him the friendship of the warmest advocates for human liberty, in whose opinion the defects of his plan were highly pardonable, on account of the energy conspicuous in his remarks. This publication was soon followed by two discourses which gained the prize in 1782 at the academy of Chalons-sur-Marne; the one upon the reform of the criminal laws, and the other on the reparation due to innocent persons unjustly accused.
It is natural to suppose that the government beheld with an evil eye these writings, which, under pretext of dragging into light the abuses of the criminal laws, insinuated dangerous principles on the nature of government in general.
His next work was intitled, A Philosophical Library of the Criminal Laws, in 10 vols; the true object of which was to disseminate in France those principles of liberty which guided the English and the Americans in framing and expounding their laws.
But the study of legislation and politics had not entirely drawn him off from that of other sciences; such as chemistry, physics, anatomy, theology, &c. These he constantly cultivated with ardour; but acknowledges that in each he met with obscurities, and that in every quarter truth escaped from his researches. He therefore sat down to investigate the nature of truth, and the proper method of attaining it in every department of research; and the result of his labours was a kind of novum organum, by which he seems to have expected that Bacon's work would be buried in oblivion; and to this important volume he gave the title of Concerning Truth; or, Thoughts on the Means of attaining Truth in all the Branches of Human Knowledge. This volume was meant as nothing more than the introduction to a greater work, in which he proposed to investigate what is certain in knowledge and what doubtful, and then to strike the balance of the account.
He was prevented, however, from completing his plan, which he regrets exceedingly; for, as he affirms, with becoming modesty, his work would certainly have amended its readers! But the French government happened to think otherwise; his aim, which, he says, was to lead mankind to reflect on their rights, was perceived, and he was accused to the minister as a sedulous writer. The career of genius was stopped by the dread of the Baillie; and he was obliged to take refuge in London. There it was his wish to create a universal confederation of the friends of liberty and truth, and to establish a centre of correspondence and union with the learned and the politicians of Europe. This dark design, however, was frustrated by the treachery, as it would appear, of his associates, who had bound themselves, he says, by the most sacred oaths, to assist him, and had offered to sign articles even with their own blood.
Finding himself unable to proceed directly to the object which he had in view, he resolved to enlighten his countrymen gradually, and to begin with exciting their love and admiration of the English constitution. That constitution, which he had investigated on the spot, appeared to him a model for those societies which were desirous of changing their form of government. It was but little known, he says, in France (the work of De Lolme being at that time only in the hands of the learned); and to make it known was to make it beloved, was to render it desired. But the French ministers flooded upon their guard, and it became necessary to deceive them. He resolved therefore to bring forward a journal, written actually in London, and professing to contain only a description of the sciences and arts of England, whilst the greater part of it was to be occupied in reality by an investigation of the English constitution.
After many difficulties, the ministry granted a privilege for this journal, being published in London, to be reprinted in Paris; and it first appeared in 1784. "In the twelve numbers which have been published (says the author), the friends of liberty must have perceived, that if, on the one side, I endeavoured to inculcate more just ideas than had hitherto been entertained concerning this celebrated island; so, on the other, I resolutely made my advances toward that important end which has perpetually presided over all my labours, the universal emancipation of men."
His affairs calling him at this time to Paris, he was arrested and conveyed to the Baillie on the 12th of July 1784. In this conduct of the government we cannot perceive any thing very tyrannical or arbitrary, since he confesses, that, in the 16th page of the first number number of his Journal, he had suffered the secret and favourite aim, which always guided his pen, to become discernible. He was, however, discharged from prison on the 5th of September, and returned with increased zeal to his former employments.
"This persecution (says he), far from extinguishing the ardour of my wishes to inculcate the principles of freedom, served only to inflame it the more." Accordingly, in 1785, he published two letters to the Emperor Joseph II., concerning the right of emigration, and the right of people to revolt. The full of these letters, which, though well known in Germany, were in France suppressed by the police, was occasioned by what the author calls the ridiculous and barbarous edict against emigration; and the second by the punishment of Horst the chief of the Walachian insurgents. In this last letter he lays it down as a maxim, that all people under such a government as that of the Walachians, have from nature a sacred right to revolt, a right which they can and ought to exercise. In the same spirit he brought out, in 1786, his Philosophical Letters on the History of England, in 2 vols., and A Critical Examination of the Travels of the Marquis de Chateletoux in North America.
The French revolution appearing to him extremely distant, notwithstanding all his efforts to hasten it, he resolved to leave France for the purpose of settling in America. His project received the approbation of several, whose sentiments were congenial with his own. But as it was thought imprudent to transport numerous families to a country so far off, without thoroughly knowing it, Briffot was engaged to proceed thither, to examine the different places, to observe the inhabitants, and to discover where and in what manner the establishment they had proposed might be most advantageously fixed. He had some time before instituted a society at Paris for accomplishing the abolition of the negro trade, and for softening the condition of the slaves. At the period of his departure, this society consisted of a considerable number of distinguished members, and he was commissioned to carry the first fruits of their labours to America. His stay there, however, was not so long as he was desirous of making it. In the beginning of 1789 he was recalled by the news of the French revolution, which he conceived might probably produce a change in his own measures and in those of his friends. This idea, added to other circumstances, accelerated his return. The fire had blazed forth in his native country. "Hope (says he) animated every heart; the most distinguished champions had engaged in the contest; I too became desirous to break a lance, and I published my Plan of Conduct for the Deputies of the People."
This, and other works of a similar kind, of which he loudly boasts the merits, raised him high in the favour of the republican part of the nation, and he became president of his district; where he acted, according to his own account, with great uprightness in the municipality, in the first committee of enquiries, and as an elector. At last he became a member, first of the National Assembly, and, after its dissolution, of the Sanguiinary Convention; and by some means or other got to be the leader of a party called sometimes the Girondists, and sometimes the Brissolites. From that period the principal events of his life were involved with the public transactions of the nation, of which we have given an account in the Encyclopedia under the title Revolution (see that article, p. 101—102.) The Girondist faction was denounced by the Mountain, and Brissol suffered by the guillotine on the 4th of November 1793. He fell indeed by a very unjust sentence; but his fall was the natural consequence of that anarchical tyranny under which no man had contributed more than he to subject his native country.