Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal

Jean-Baptiste followed his father as lawyer in the bailiwick and bought a number of biens nationaux sold to the criminal court where his brother Joseph worked during the French Revolution.

At some point he followed the minor fashion for adopting classical names (e.g. Gracchus Babeuf, Anacharsis Cloots) and took to calling himself Mucius Scaevola Coffinhal.

[9] Politically close to Maximilien Robespierre, he behaved with a zeal and an intransigence that bred a deep hatred among his enemies, along with his tendency for misplaced witticisms.

[10] A year after the Revolutionary Tribunal was established, Coffinhal presided at the trial of Jacques-René Hébert and the Hébertistes (March 1794), for which as well as directing the proceedings he was responsible for editing the official report.

[12] Six weeks later he presided over the trial of those accused in the Luxembourg Conspiracy and condemned the poet Andre Chenier, only three days before the Thermidorian reaction which brought him down.

[13] During the evening of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) Coffinhal, together with 8 or 10,000 men from the sections and a company of artillery, succeeded in bringing Hanriot from the Committee of General Security to the Hôtel de Ville, Paris.

Eventually hunger forced him to break cover, and on 5 August he made for the house of his mistress Mme Nègre in the rue Montorgueil, but she refused to take him in.

It is said that as he mounted the scaffold, the jeering crowd yelled at him the phrase he had used so much when presiding at the Revolutionary Tribunal - 'Coffinhal, tu n'as pas la parole!'