The responsibility of his station was to act as arbiter in legal disputes which involved points of honour, and this permitted him to make the acquaintance of a number of aristocrats in the region.

He vigorously opposed revolutionary governments and was characterised by his loyalty to the King, his opposition to repressive measures against rebellious priests and to laws confiscating the goods of émigrés, and his denunciation of the massacres at Avignon.

"[10] Nicolas de Condorcet, his hostile colleague in the Legislative Assembly in 1791, said of him: "There are, at all meetings, these noisy air-headed orators, who produce a great effect through the constant repetition of redundant inanities.

Following the majority of the Assembly who sought to abolish slavery in the Antilles, he nevertheless took aim in a speech of 20 March at those hardline abolitionists like Brissot who knew little of life in the colonies and of the risks of civil war given the diversity of ethnicities and social conflicts in Saint-Domingue.

Hippolyte Taine wrote: "After the principal defender of La Fayette, M. de Vaublanc, had been assaulted three times, he took the precaution of not immediately returning home; but the rabble besieged his house, shouting that eighty citizens must die by their hands, and that he should be the first; twelve men climbed to his apartment, ransacked it, and continued the search in neighbouring houses, hoping for members of his family if he himself could not be seized; he was informed that if he returned to his domicile he would be slaughtered."

[15] On 10 August 1792, the day that marked the downfall of the Legislative Assembly and the Monarchy at the hands of the Paris Commune, he witnessed from his carriage the toppling of the statue of Louis XIV in what is now the Place Vendôme.

He enjoined the Assembly to leave Paris for royalist Rouen to escape the revolutionary pressures, and he avoided an assassination attempt when he was narrowly saved from a sabre cut by a young officer of genius, Captain Louis Bertrand de Sivray, who was to make a name for himself as general.

[16] The second volume of his memoirs provides insight into the general atmosphere at the time of the Terror, as felt by an aristocratic royalist, who was at risk of being arrested at any moment and finishing up on the scaffold, and yet forced to travel back and forth over the territory of the brand new French Republic.

On 3 September 1792, hearing a commotion in the courtyard, he thought himself betrayed; but it was in fact the passage of a rabble brandishing the head of the Princesse de Lamballe on a pole.

He lived in hiding for several months; it was there that he learnt that the newspaper Gorsas accused him among others of having "accepted 300,000 francs from the Queen for the purpose of organising the Counter-Revolution in Provence", and that he "met with them secretly."

Opting at first for the south of France, and Bordeaux in particular, he changed direction after having learnt of the ferocious oppression led there by Tallien, the Convention's representative, and the dangers that travel in those regions entailed.

After the appearance of this book, the committee entrusted with the drawing up of the Constitution of Year III (comprising Daunou and François-Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas) invited him to elaborate on his theories, but he refused.

Opposed to the Decree of Two Thirds, he took on an active rôle with Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy at the time of the insurrection of 13 Vendemaire IV (5 October 1795).

On 17 October, as head of the royalist faction of the Faubourg Poissonnière, he was condemned to death in absentia by a military commission presided over by General Lostange, which had its headquarters at the Théâtre-Français.

The college of Melun elected Vaublanc as deputy for Seine-et-Marne and as a member of the Council of 500; however he had to wait for his friends Desfourneaux and Pastoret to overturn his sentence (by reason of unconstitutionality).

On the same day, the Legislature proceeded to replace the republican Director, Le Tourneur (who had gained the position by drawing straws), with the moderate royalist François de Barthélémy, at that time the French ambassador to Switzerland.

On 3 September, Vaublanc, with his colleague Admiral Louis Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse and other clichiens, was a hair's breadth from achieving a coup d'état against the triumvirate of republican directors.

[17] Unfortunately for him, General Bonaparte, then head of the Armée d'Italie, intercepted a royalist agent, Louis-Alexandre de Launay, comte d'Antraigues, in possession of documents revealing the conspiracy and the treason of Pichegru.

[17] The coup d'état of 18 Brumaire VIII (10 November 1799), and the accession to power of the Consulat, which gave amnesty to the proscribed, permitted him to return to France, where he was presented to Bonaparte.

In 1800, Vaublanc was elected by the conservative Senate to be deputy for Calvados, one of 300 members of the Legislature (Corps législatif), and to fulfil the duties of questeur for a five-year term.

On 4 November 1804, Pope Pius VII stayed the night at Vaublanc's house in Montargis, 28 rue de Loing, while travelling to Paris for the coronation of the Emperor.

In June of that year he had an audience with the Emperor at the time of his passage through Metz, during which, according to the third volume of his Memoirs, he strongly objected to the idea of a campaign against Russia.

During the campaign of 1813, after the withdrawal of the Mainz Army from Leipzig, a large number of wounded soldiers took refuge in Metz, resulting in a typhoid epidemic of which Vaublanc fell victim; he escaped death narrowly.

An ordre d'arrestation, published by Marshal Davout in Le Moniteur Universel, forced him to flee towards Luxembourg, joining Louis XVIII at Ghent.

Wishing to live down his Bonapartist past, he became known as one of the most fervent leaders of the party of "Ultras", even going so far (while Minister of the Interior) as to remove the letter N from the bridges of Paris.

On the tabling by the Keeper of the Seals of a law that would reestablish cours prévôtales or "special courts" before the Chamber of Deputies (nicknamed the Chambre introuvable), Vaublanc shouted out: "France wants its King!"

On 18 November, he signed a statute that replaced the general staff of the National Guard with a committee of three Inspectors-General who were the members of the council of the Colonel-General — none other than the Comte d'Artois.

Hoping to stay in power as long as possible, the Chamber tabled a counter-proposal involving a general election every five years, which in turn was rejected by the Government.

The Russian Ambassador, a Corsican named Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, went so far as to blame Vaublanc for a large part of it: "One of the principal sources of the disorder has been the heterogeneous composition of the ministry; the defection of that of the Interior has greatly weakened the authority and the influence of the Crown on the Chambers."

[19] Replaced by Joseph Louis Joachim Lainé shortly after the failure of his plans for electoral reform, he left on 8 May 1816, the same day as the Minister of Justice, François Barbé-Marbois, who had been sacked at the insistence of the Comte d'Artois in a tit-for-tat deal.