Antoine-Christophe Merlin

Antoine-Christophe Merlin (born September 13, 1762, Thionville, France—died September 14, 1833, Paris) was a democratic radical during the early years of the French Revolution who became one of the leading organizers of the conservative Thermidorian reaction that followed the collapse of the radical democratic Jacobin regime of 1793–94.

Merlin was the son of an attorney and studied theology before becoming a lawyer in 1788. The Revolution broke out in the following year, and in 1791 Merlin was elected to the Legislative Assembly. He vigorously urged the Assembly to confiscate the property of émigrés and hold their wives and children as hostages, and he was one of the three deputies who joined the Club of the Cordeliers—then the most radical political society in Paris.

Elected to the National Convention, which succeeded the Legislative Assembly in September 1792, Merlin was sent in December on a mission to Mainz. While there he wrote the Convention demanding that King Louis XVI be put to death; the king was guillotined in January 1793. Merlin displayed great courage during the siege of Mainz by Austro-Prussian forces, and, after the garrison fell in July 1793, he fought against the counterrevolutionary peasant insurgents of the Vendée. Nevertheless, the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, suspecting him of colluding with the enemy at Mainz, recalled him to Paris in November.

As a result, Merlin joined the group of conspirators who brought about the downfall of the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794). During the ensuing Thermidorian reaction he helped organize the jeunesse dorée (“gilded youth”), a movement of fashionably dressed young men of bourgeois background who terrorized Jacobin workmen. Merlin then sat in the Directory government’s Council of the Five Hundred from 1795 until 1798, when he was appointed administrator general of posts. He took no part in public life during Napoleon’s regime (1799–1815), and he managed to escape banishment after the restoration of King Louis XVIII in 1815.