Jean-Louis Carra, born on 9 March 1742 in Pont-de-Veyle and guillotined on 31 October 1793 in Paris, was a journalist and participant in the French Revolution.

After collaborating on the Encyclopedia of Yverdon, he joined the team writing the Supplément à l'Encyclopédie in July 1771, for which he wrote 400 articles on Geography, and which he left in June 1772 after a quarrel with the editorial director Robinet.

However, several people claimed that, despite all these protestations of a republicanism that knew neither deference nor indulgence, Carra was the agent of a party that wanted to place the Duke of Brunswick on the throne of France.

This suspicion found fertile ground with Robespierre, who branded him a traitor, notwithstanding the fact that Carra had consistently been one of his most effective collaborators.

[5] However, Carra was elected deputy to the National Convention by the departments of Eure and Saône-et-Loire: he accepted the nomination of the latter while he was replaced in the former by Louis-Jacques Savary.

It was in this paper that, from the first months of 1792, he insisted that the populace be armed with pikes in order to oppose it to the national guard, composed solely of the bourgeois of each city, and he repeated this so often that his wishes were finally satisfied.

Rejected by Robespierre's party, Carra sided with the Brissotins, and was appointed, under the ministry of Roland, guard of the National Library.