François Hanriot
His position there was also ill-fated; he was dismissed after leaving his station on the night of 12 July 1789, when the popular Jacques Necker was fired, and angry Parisians attempted to burn down the building belonging to the Wall of the Ferme générale.
[4] His next string of occupations is rather hazy in history; many people of the time connect him to a variety of professions including shopkeeper, liquor-seller, and peddler.
[5] In the evening the "commissionaires" of several sections (Billaud-Varenne, Chaumette, Hébert, Hanriot, Fleuriot-Lescot, Pache, Bourdon) gathered in the town hall.
As a member of the Cordeliers club he was strongly in favor of imposing taxes on the aristocracy, presenting them "with a bill in one hand and a pistol in the other."
With this attitude he gained a loyal following of local sans-culottes and they would appoint him on 2 September as captain of the National Guard battalion of his section.
[7] The Spring of 1793 was a period of great political tension in Paris as the radical voices in the Commune and the Montagnards in the Convention became more overtly hostile to the ruling Girondist faction.
[8] The authorities' decision to arrest Jean-Paul Marat in April brought matters to a head and precipitated the fall of the Girondins in which Hanriot played a major part.
In the evening of 30 May 1793 the Commune appointed Hanriot provisionally to the position of "Commandant-General" of the Parisian National Guard,[9] because Santerre was fighting in the Vendée.
[18] In the early evening of 2 June, a large force of armed citizens; estimated by some sources as 80,000, but spoken of by Danton as 30,000 souls,[19][20] surrounded the Convention with 63 pieces of artillery.
[26] On 1 July he was elected by the Commune and two days later appointed by Jean Bouchotte as permanent commander of the armed forces of Paris.
Supported by Hanriot they demanded tougher measures against rising prices and the setting up of a system of terror to root out the counter-revolution.
[28] On 11 September the power of the Committee of Public Safety was extended for one month; Robespierre supported Hanriot in the Jacobin club as having led the insurrection on 2 June.
On 19 September the Convention supported his appointment as General commanding the Parisian National Guard (at that time numbering 130,000 men).
[15] Hanriot moved into an apartment on the third floor of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris,[29] with busts of Brutus, Marat and Rousseau displayed.
[citation needed] During the spring of 1794, there were increasing tensions between Robespierre and the Committees on the one hand, and the Paris Commune and the sans-culottes on the other.
On 5 June François Hanriot ordered the detaining of every baker in Paris who either sold his bread to people without (distribution) cards or who came from other sections.
Laurent Lecointre was the instigator of the coup,[35] assisted by Barère, Fréron, Barras, Tallien, Thuriot, Courtois, Rovère, Garnier de l’Aube and Guffroy.
They decided that Hanriot, his aides-de-camp, Lavalette and Boulanger,[36] the public prosecutor Dumas, the family Duplay and the printer Charles-Léopold Nicolas had to be arrested first, so Robespierre would be without military or other effective support.
[37] On horseback, Hanriot warned the sections that there would be an attempt to murder Robespierre and mobilized 2,400 National Guards in front of the town hall.
[42] When the Paris Commune heard of the arrests it began mobilising forces to free Robespierre and his allies and to take control of the Convention.
[44] When Hanriot appeared at the Place du Carrousel in front of the Convention, he was taken prisoner by the oldest deputy present Philippe Rühl.
[45] According to Eric Hazan: "Now came the turning-point of this journée: instead of taking advantage of its superiority, in both guns and men, to invade the nearby hall where the Convention was sitting, the column, lacking orders or leaders, returned to the Maison-Commune.
[42][15] In the afternoon of 10 Thermidor (28 July, a décadi, a day of rest and festivity) the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned Robespierre and 21 "Robespierrists" (c.q.
Hanriot owned 47 prints of different events during the revolution, a "magnifique" wooden secretary desk, and the complete works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published by Pierre-Alexandre DuPeyrou and René Louis de Girardin (1780–1782).
