A close associate of Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre, he was one of the most militant members of the Committee of Public Safety, and is often considered a key architect of the Reign of Terror.

[8] Deported to Cayenne without trial, he married a black ex-slave named Brigitte, refused Napoleon's pardon there and finally died in Port-au-Prince in 1819.

Here he later became a professor when he felt dissatisfied with practicing law, remaining for a short while, until his writing of a comédie strained his relationship with those who ran the school and he was obliged to leave in 1785.

In early 1789 he published at Amsterdam a three-volume work on the Despotisme des ministres de la France, and a well-received anti-clerical text titled "The Last Blow Against Prejudice and Superstition.

[13] An example of his beliefs regarding the Church can be found in this text:[12] However painful an amputation may be, when a member is gangrened it must be sacrificed if we wish to save the body.Joining the Jacobin Club, Billaud-Varenne became, from 1790, one of the most violent anti-Royalist orators, closely linked to Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois.

After the flight to Varennes of King Louis XVI, he published a pamphlet, L'Acéphocratie (from the Greek: ακεφοκρατια, meaning 'power without head), in which he demanded the establishment of a federal republic.

[13] On the night of 10 August 1792 (during the attack on the Tuileries Palace) he met with Danton, Desmoulins, and other members of the Insurrectionary Commune during the critical hours before the overthrow of the monarchy.

On 2 June 1793, in the context of Jean-Paul Marat's anti-Girondist instigations, he proposed a decree of accusation against the Girondists; a week later, at the Jacobin Club, he outlined a programme which the convention was to fulfil soon after: the expulsion of foreigners, the establishment of a tax on the rich, the deprivation of the rights of citizenship of all "anti-social" men, the creation of a French Revolutionary Army, the monitoring of all officers and ci-devant nobles (i.e.: those of aristocratic families who no longer held status after the abolition of feudalism), and the death penalty for unsuccessful generals fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars.

[19] The law of 22 Prairial reduced the right of defense to simply an appearance before court, while greatly expanding the list of crimes punishable by death.

Though it could have been about the Catherine Théot affair or the law of 22 Prairial, it led to Billaud-Varenne branding Robespierre a dictator and the latter storming out of the Committee headquarters and ceasing to attend meetings.

Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, as members who the speech may have been aimed at, attempted to defend themselves but were shouted down and expelled from the club as cries for "la guillotine," rained down upon them.

Billaud-Varenne was next to speak, with Collot d'Herbois controlling the debates from the President's Chair, and in an eloquent planned denunciation directly accused Robespierre of a conspiracy against the Republic.

Too closely associated with the excesses of the Reign of Terror, he was shortly attacked himself in the convention for his ruthlessness, and a commission was appointed to examine his conduct and that of some other members of the former Committee of Public Safety.

[30] Billaud-Varenne was arrested, and as a result of the Jacobin-led insurrection of 12 Germinal of the Year III (1 April 1795), the Convention decreed his immediate deportation to French Guiana, along with Collot d'Herbois and Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, where he picked up farming and took as concubine a black slave girl called Brigitte.

Regarding the colonization of Haiti by the Kingdom of France and the attempts of Louis XVIII to regain control of the island by diplomatic means, he announced to Pétion :[32] The biggest fault you committed, in the course of the revolution of this country, is not having sacrificed all the settlers, down to the last one.

Among his last words, he declared: "My bones, at least, will rest on a land that wants Liberty; but I hear the voice of posterity accusing me of having spared the blood of the tyrants of Europe too much.