André Boniface Louis Riqueti de Mirabeau

André Boniface Louis Riqueti, Vicomte de Mirabeau (30 November 1754 – 15 September 1792), brother of the orator Honoré Mirabeau, was one of the reactionary leaders at the opening of the French Revolution.

Life
Caricature of Mirabeau.

Known as Barrel Mirabeau (Mirabeau-Tonneau) because of his "rotundity" and voluminous taste for drink,[1] he was sent to the army in Malta in 1776, and spent part of his two years there in prison for insulting a religious procession. He served as a colonel, commanding the Touraine Regiment under the comte de Rochambeau in the American Revolution.[2] During the war, he was in several sea-fights with the English and witnessed the Battle of Yorktown in 1781.[3]

In the following year, he had two narrow escapes from drowning. With his debts paid up by his father, he was elected by the noblesse of Limoges a deputy to the States General. Unlike his brother, he opposed the French Revolution. He was a violent conservative and opposed everything that threatened the old régime. and in 1790 left France to join the royalist counter-revolutionary forces in Germany. He was not very successful in his efforts to form a regiment from French exiles and deserters, and died of a stroke in Freiburg two years later.[3]

To Mirabeau is attributed a statement otherwise associated with Voltaire,

Other states possess an army; Prussia is an army which possesses a state.[4]

He shared fully in the eccentric family pride; and boasted of his brother's genius even when bitterly opposing him. He emigrated about 1790 and raised a legion which was to bear his name; but his insolence alienated the German princes and his command was taken from him. He died in August 1792 of apoplexy or from a duel in Freiburg im Breisgau. He wrote some verse as well as various pamphlets.[3]

Notes
  1. Caryle, Thomas (1937). "The French Revolution, a History in Three Parts". Retrieved 14 September 2016.
  2. Wilson & Fiske 1900.
  3. Chisholm 1911.
  4. Wayne C. Thompson, Nordic, Central, and Southeastern Europe 2015-2016, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015 p.186

References

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