Jean Lambert, a notorious personage during the French Revolution, was born at Paris in 1769. He was the son of the house-porter of the Marquis de Bercy, who, attracted by the quickness of the lad, took the charge of his education. He afterwards became clerk to an attorney, secretary to the deputy Brozaretet, and was foreman for some time in the printing-office of the Moniteur. In August 1790, by the advice, it is said, of Marat, Tallien placarded the walls of Paris with a sheet called L'Ami du Citoyen. The Jacobin Club defrayed the cost. The design of this broad-side was to excite the populace against Louis XVI. On the 8th of July 1792, so well known had he become as a furious revolutionist, that he was chosen orator of a section of the people before the bar of the Assembly. He likewise became a favourite of Danton's, who employed him as one of his agents. The signature of Tallien is attached to most of the warrants preceding the massacres, and to the orders for payment to the executioners and assassins. It was he who received the plunder from the persons of the killed, and he is reported to have "locked them up in a chest of which he kept the key." He was subsequently made a deputy of the National Convention; he voted for the king's death; and made vigorous efforts in defence of Marat. In 1793, he was sent on a mission to extirpate the Girondists in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. There his diligence rivalled the bloody terrors of Lebon and Carrier. He erected the guillotine in the great square of the town, and watched from the neighbouring windows the progress of the bloody work. Famine and terror brought up the rear of Tallien's butchery. The "red-gloomy Dis" (Carlyle's French Revolution) seized upon the coin of the bankers, upon the exchange of the shopkeepers, and upon the funds of the wealthy, not to procure food for the starving inhabitants, but to treasure it up securely in his own coffers. Suddenly a change was observed in the stern rigour of the assassin. A certain Madame Cabarus, subsequently de Fontenai, a Spanish lady of great beauty, is said to have fallen into the hands of Tallien, and proved a deliverer to the last remnant of the Girondists. News of this Delilah was heard in Paris: orders came for her imprisonment and for Tallien's recall. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and others, were now gone. Tallien found himself disgraced, and entirely at the mercy of Robespierre, who had recently assumed dictatorial power. A short reflection told him how to act. He would fawn on the dictator, and strive meanwhile secretly to overthrow him. Tallien accordingly bore all the tyrant's denunciations with great meekness. On the 27th of July 1794, he started up, amid the noise and tumult of the Assembly, and flashed his "Brutus-steel" in the face of "the incorruptible," denounced Robespierre openly, and had him dragged off to prison. (See Robespierre.) Tallien was next created a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and was re-elected to the Jacobin Club. He is said to have used his influence on the side of mercy; but the taunts of the state prisoners, and the attacks of the newspaper press respecting his atrocities at Bordeaux, brought him into general discredit, which neither his services in May 1795, nor in the district of La Vendee, could at all retrieve.

Tallien was employed by Napoleon on his expedition to Egypt in 1798; but he was sent back to Paris in 1801 by the orders of General Menou. He parted from his wife, Madame de Fontenai, the old Bordeaux beauty, whom he had married in 1794; and languished in great distress till 1814, when Fouché obtained for him the consulship of Alicante. The return of the Bourbons in 1814 cut him off from this last resource. He died in great poverty in Paris, on the 16th of November 1820.