Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

Bust of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau at Palace of Versailles

The family of Riqueti, with possible distant origins in Italy, became wealthy through merchant trading in Marseilles. In 1570, Jean Riqueti bought the château and seigniory of Mirabeau, which had belonged to the great Provençal family of Barras. In 1685, Honoré Riqueti obtained the title "marquis de Mirabeau".

His son, Jean Antoine, grandfather of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, served with distinction through all the later campaigns of the reign of Louis XIV. At the Battle of Cassano (1705), he suffered a neck wound so severe that he had to wear a silver stock ever after. Because he tended to be blunt and tactless, he never rose above the rank of colonel. On retiring from the service, he married Françoise de Castellane, with whom he had three sons: Victor (marquis de Mirabeau), Jean Antoine (bailli de Mirabeau) and Louis Alexandre (comte de Mirabeau). Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, was the son of Victor.

Honoré-Gabriel Mirabeau was born at Le Bignon, near Nemours, the eldest surviving son of the economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and his wife Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. He was also the fifth child and second son of the couple. When he was three years old, a virulent attack of smallpox left his face disfigured. This, combined with Mirabeau's resemblance to his maternal ancestors and his fondness for his mother, contributed to his father's dislike of him.[2] At the age of five, his father had him sent to the strict boarding school of Abbé Choquart in Paris by the false name of "Pierre-Buffière" according to estate possessed by his mother. Destined for the army, at age eighteen, he entered the military school in Paris in the regiment of Berri-Cavaleria at Saints.[3] Of this school, which had Joseph-Louis Lagrange for its professor of mathematics, there is an amusing account in the life of Gilbert Elliot, who met Mirabeau there. On leaving school in 1767, he received a commission in a cavalry regiment that his grandfather had commanded years before.

Mirabeau's love affairs are well-known, owing to the celebrity of the letters to Marie Thérèse de Monnier, his "Sophie". In spite of his disfigurement (or perhaps because of it), he won the heart of the lady to whom his colonel was attached; this led to such scandal that his father obtained a lettre de cachet, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Île de Ré. On being released, the young nobleman obtained leave to accompany the French expedition to Corsica as a volunteer. During the Corsican expedition, Mirabeau contracted several more gambling debts and engaged in another scandalous love affair. However, he proved his military genius in the Corsican expedition, and also conducted a thorough study of the island during his stay. The study was most likely factually incorrect, but his desire to learn of a country that had been previously unstudied emphasizes Mirabeau's endless curiosity and inquisitiveness, particularly into the traditions and customs of society. Mirabeau learned the value of hard work in the French army. This aspect of Mirabeau's personality contributed to his popular success in later years, during the Revolution.[2] After his return, he tried to keep on good terms with his father, and in 1772 he married a rich heiress, Marie–Marquerite–Emilie de Covet, daughter of the marquis de Marignane. Emilie, who was 18 years old, was apparently engaged to a much older nobleman, the Comte de Valbelle. Nonetheless, Mirabeau pursued her for several months, expecting that their marriage would benefit from the money that the couple would receive from their parents. After several months of failed attempts at being introduced to the heiress, Mirabeau bribed one of the young lady's maids to let him into her residence, where he pretended to have had a sexual encounter with Emilie. To avoid losing face, her father saw that they got married just a couple of days afterwards. Mirabeau received a small allowance of 6,000 livres from his father, but never received the expected dowry from the marquis.

Mirabeau, who was still facing financial trouble and increasing debt, could not keep up with the expensive lifestyle to which his wife was accustomed, and their extravagances forced his father to send him into semi-exile in the country, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le despotisme. The couple had a son who died early, mostly due to the poor living conditions they were experiencing at that time. Then his wife asked for judicial separation in 1782. She was defended by Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, who later became one of the editors of the Civil Code. Mirabeau defended his own cause in this trial but lost, holding resentment against Portalis forever.

Mirabeau's violent disposition led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Château d'If in 1774. In 1775 he was transferred to the castle of Joux, where he was not closely confined, having full leave to enter the town of Pontarlier. In a house of a friend he met Marie Thérèse de Monnier, known as "Sophie", and the two fell in love. He escaped to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to the United Provinces, where he lived by writing hack work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for sedition and abduction, and in May 1777 he was seized by the Dutch police, sent to France and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes.

The early part of his confinement is marked by indecent letters to Sophie (first published in 1793 by Pierre Louis Manuel), and the obscene Erotica biblion and Ma conversion. In Vincennes, he met the Marquis de Sade, who was also writing erotic works; however the two disliked each other intensely.[4] It was in these writings, however, that Mirabeau developed experience as an orator. He learned how to curb his natural eloquence and his dialectic became firm, commanding and moving. The prison in which he was held was the first platform to hear his voice.[5] Later during his confinement, he wrote Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état, published after his liberation (1782). It exhibits an accurate knowledge of French constitutional history, skillfully marshaled to demonstrate that the system of lettres de cachet was not only philosophically unjust but constitutionally illegal. It shows, though in a rather diffuse and declamatory form, wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence, applied to a practical purpose, which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman.

Statue of Honoré de Mirabeau. Palais de justice d'Aix-en-Provence

His release from Vincennes in August 1782 began the second period of Mirabeau's life. Mirabeau not only succeeded in reversing the sentence of death against him, but also got an order for Sophie's husband to pay the costs of the whole legal proceedings. It was thought Mirabeau would come out of the lawsuit in Aix ruined: his past convictions in prison, scandalous relationships with women, and the bad relationship with his father the Marquis all gave him a terrible reputation among judges and adversaries. However, despite being condemned by the judge, his reputation was greatly enhanced in the eyes of the public. He had withered his opponents, crushed the opposing lawyer and turned the cards in his favor regarding the death sentence. From this day forward, Mirabeau became regarded as a man of the people.[6] Upon his release, he found that his Sophie had consoled herself with a young officer, after whose death she had committed suicide. From Pontarlier he went to Aix-en-Provence, where he claimed the court's order said that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, and he finally lost in the third appeal of the case when Emilie's father produced to the court compromising letters from Mirabeau addressed to the marquess. Mirabeau then intervened in the suit between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris and attacked the ruling powers so violently that he had to leave France and return to the Dutch Republic, where he tried to live by writing. For a period he was employed by the publisher Marc-Michel Rey.

Statue of Mirabeau at the Panthéon

About this time he met Madame de Nehra, the daughter of Willem van Haren, a Dutch statesman and political writer. She was an educated, refined woman capable of appreciating Mirabeau's good points. His life was strengthened by the love of Mme de Nehra, his adopted son, Lucas de Montigny, and his little dog Chico. After a time in the Dutch Republic he went to England, where his treatise on lettres de cachet was much admired after it was translated into English in 1787. He was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London through his old school friend Gilbert Elliot, who had become a leading Whig member of parliament. Of all his English friends, none seem to have been as close to him as Lord Shelburne and Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly was introduced to Mirabeau by Sir Francis D'Ivernois, who undertook the translation of Mirabeau's Considérations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus into English.

The Considérations was one of several works that Mirabeau wrote in the year 1785, and it is a good specimen of his method. He had read a pamphlet published in America attacking the order, founded in 1783 as a bond of association between officers who had fought in the American Revolutionary War against Britain. The arguments struck him as true and valuable, so he rearranged them in his own fashion, and rewrote them in his own oratorical style. He supplemented the work with materials provided personally by Benjamin Franklin, who shared Mirabeau's opinions on the topic, but was not in a position to criticize the "noble order" espoused by the Society of the Cincinnati directly, because he was serving as the United States Minister to France at the time.[7]

Several other pamphlets Mirabeau wrote in 1785 attacked financial speculation. Among those, De La Caisse d'Escompte[8] was prescient in that it correctly predicted the risky nature and ultimate demise of the French "Discount Bank."[9] This book, which condemned the fiscal politics of the state as going against the interest of the public, was among the influential literature critical of the French government in the years leading up to the French Revolution.[10]

He soon found that such work did not pay enough to keep his retinue, and so he sought employment from the French foreign office, either as a writer or a diplomat. He first sent Mme de Nehra to Paris to make peace with the authorities, and then returned himself with hopes of getting a job through an old literary collaborateur of his, Durival, who was at this time director of finance at the department of foreign affairs. One of this official's functions was to subsidize political pamphleteers, and Mirabeau hoped to be so employed. However, he ruined his chances with a series of writings on financial questions.

On his return to Paris he had become acquainted with Étienne Clavière, the Genevese exile, and a banker named Panchaud. From them he learnt about the abuse of stock-jobbing, and seizing their ideas he began to regard stock-jobbing, or agiotage (known in English as "arbitrage"), as the source of all evil, and to attack in his usual vehement style the Banque de St-Charles and the Compagnie des Eaux. This pamphlet brought him into controversy with Pierre Beaumarchais, who certainly did not get the best of it, but it lost him any chance of employment with the government.

His abilities were too great, however, to be overlooked by the foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. After a preliminary trip to Berlin in early 1786, he was dispatched that July on a mission to the royal court of Prussia. Upon his return in January, Mirabeau published a full account in his Secret History of the Court of Berlin (1787).[11] This account denounced the Prussian court as scandalous and corrupt, described the dying King Frederick the Great as weak and overly emotional, and labeled Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of Frederick the Great and a guest of the French court, as narrow-minded and incompetent. He also wrote contemptuously of Prussia's principal ministers Ewald Friedrich, Count von Hertzberg, and Joachim von Blumenthal. The resulting uproar was an extreme embarrassment for the French government, which quickly censored the book, but could not prevent its widespread notoriety. Mirabeau's episode provided inspiration to many more radical publishers who came to regard Mirabeau as a leader of the coming revolution.[12]

During his journey to Germany, he had made the acquaintance of Jakob Mauvillon, an expert on Prussia whose expertise Mirabeau made use of in his De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand (London, 1788). In 1788, Mirabeau was approached and asked to offer himself as a candidate for secretary to the Assembly of Notables, which the King Louis XVI had just convened as a method to circumvent the opposition of the parlements to crown initiatives seeking to reform France's tax structure. His chance to be a leading voice in France as it faced political ferment seemed to be fading as he turned down the crown offer, explaining his reasoning in a letter of 18 April 1788 to the minister Montmorin.[13] In this affair he had sought to bring his name before the public by publishing another financial work, the Dénonciation de l'agiotage, however, it had contained diatribes that harmed his chance to serve as secretary, and led him to retire to Tongeren. He further injured his prospects by publishing the reports he had sent back to France during his secret mission to Berlin. But 1789 was at hand; the Estates-General was summoned, and the French Revolution broke out soon afterward. As a result, Mirabeau was able to exploit a completely new set of political circumstances to expand exponentially his political influence.

"Let us weep for the loss of Mirabeau": commemorative plate, c.1791 (Carnavalet Museum, Paris)

Mirabeau's health had been damaged by the excesses of his youth and his strenuous work in politics, and in 1791, he contracted pericarditis. With the continuous medical attention paid to him by his friend and physician Pierre Jean George Cabanis, Mirabeau survived to perform his duties as president of the National Assembly until his death on 2 April 1791 in Paris. Even close to the end, he directed debates with eloquence that further increased his popularity. The people of Paris cherished him as one of the fathers of the Revolution.[31] During the Trial of Louis XVI in 1792, Mirabeau's dealings with the royal court were brought to light, and he was largely discredited by the public after it became known that he had secretly acted as an intermediary between the monarchy and the revolutionaries and had taken payment for it.[32] Historians in the 21st century discovered secret documents in the archives of Vienna that demonstrate that the Austrian ambassador orchestrated the meetings with the king and queen. Florimond-Claude, comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the ambassador, was the queen's political advisor, with advice tailored to the needs of Austria, not France.[33]

Funeral of Mirabeau in the Church of St Eustache, 4 April 1791, (Musée de la Révolution française).

He received a grand burial, and it was for him that the Panthéon in Paris was created as a burial place for great Frenchmen. The street where he died (rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin) was renamed rue Mirabeau. In 1792, his secret dealings with the king were uncovered, and in 1794 his remains were removed from the Panthéon and were replaced with those of Jean-Paul Marat.[34] His remains were then buried anonymously in the graveyard of Clamart. In spite of searches performed in 1889, they were not found.

With Mirabeau's death the task of saving the monarchy became much more difficult, as the king was less reconciled than he had ever been with the Revolution, and thus revolutionary leaders became less willing to share power with a king who proved so unwilling to compromise. Some historians, such as Francois Furet, however, believe that even had he lived, there would have been a similar outcome, as it would have been extremely difficult to remake the old monarchy in harmony with the growing democratic ideals of the age.[13]

Mirabeau proved himself as one of the strongest early leaders of the revolution. His energy captivated his audience, his leadership was often the lead of the revolutionary ideas, while his work with the king stained his image. Mirabeau's early life, though filled with the ideas of a young man revolting against a stern father, helped give him these qualities.[35]

"Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau" by Joseph Boze, 1789

His first literary work written after the bombastic, but eloquent Essai sur le despotisme (Neufchâtel, 1775) was a translation of Robert Watson's Philip II, done in Amsterdam with the help of Nicolas-Luton Durival. His Considerations sur l'ordre de Cincinnatus (London, 1788) was based on a pamphlet by Aedanus Burke of South Carolina, who opposed the aristocratic tendencies of the Society of the Cincinnati, and the notes to it were by Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target. His financial writings were suggested by the Genevese exile Étienne Clavière.

During the Revolution, he received yet more help; men were proud to labour for him, and did not murmur because he absorbed all the credit and fame. Étienne Dumont, Clavière, Antoine-Adrien Lamourette and Étienne Salonion Reybaz were but a few of the most distinguished of his collaborators. Dumont was a Genevese exile and old friend of Romilly who willingly prepared the famous addresses that Mirabeau used to make to the Assembly marked by sudden bursts of eloquent declamation; Clavière helped him in finance and not only worked out his figures, but also wrote his financial discourses; Lamourette wrote the speeches on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy; Reybaz not only wrote for him his famous speeches on the assignats, the organization of the national guard, and others, which Mirabeau read word for word at the tribune, but also even the posthumous speech on succession to the estates of intestates, which Talleyrand read in the Assembly as the last work of his dead friend.

He was played by Sir Peter Ustinov in the 1989 film La Révolution française.

He was also portrayed in the popular video game Assassin's Creed Unity as an Assassin and one of the main characters.

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

• Carlyle, Thomas (1837). "Mirabeau". Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Volume III. The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes. Vol. XXVIII. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (published 1904). pp. 403–480.
• Epstein, David M. "Mirabeau and The French Revolution: A Reappraisal," The Historian (1970) 32#4 pp 576–594 DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1970.tb00379.x online
• Furet, François and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989), pp. 264–72
• Luttrell, Barbara. Mirabeau (Southern Illinois University press, 1990), scholarly biography
• Price, Munro. "Mirabeau and the Court: Some New Evidence," French Historical Studies (2006) 29#1 pp 37–75, online
• Warwick, Charles F. Mirabeau and the French revolution (Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2005)
• von Guttner-Sporzynski, Darius. The French Revolution (2015).

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Honoré Mirabeau.

• "Mirabeau, Gabriel Honoré Riqueti, Count de" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
• Works by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau at Project Gutenberg