Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville (10 June
1746 – 7 May 1795) was a French prosecutor
during the Revolution and Reign of Terror
periods.
== Biography ==
=== 
Early career ===
Born in Herouël, a village in the département
of the Aisne, he was the son of a seigneurial
landowner.
He studied law and in 1774 purchased a position
as prosecutor procureur attached to the Châtelet
in Paris.
He sold his office in 1781 to pay off his
debts and became a clerk under the lieutenant-general
of police.Little is known of the part he played
at the outbreak of the Revolution.
According to himself, he was part of the National
Guard at its formation.
He was active in the politics of his section
in 1789, and in August 1792, supported the
sans culotte movement.
Backed by his cousin Camille Desmoulins, Fouquier
de Tinville became the foreman of a jury established
to pass verdict on crimes of Royalists arrested
after the journée du 10 août in 1792.
=== Public prosecutor ===
When the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was
created by the National Convention on 10 March
1793, he was appointed its public prosecutor,
an office that he filled until 1 August 1794.
His zeal in prosecution earned him the nickname
Purveyor to the Guillotine.His activity during
this time earned him the reputation of one
of the most sinister figures of the Revolution.
His office as public prosecutor arguably reflected
a need to display the appearance of legality
during what was essentially political command,
more than a need to establish actual guilt.
Fouquier de Tinville, like Maximilien Robespierre,
was known for his ruthless radicalism.One
of the last groups he prosecuted included
seven nuns, aged 32–66, of the former convent
of Carmelites, living in Paris, plus an eighth
nun, of the Convent of the Visitation,
. . .who were charged with consorting together
and scheming to trouble the State by provoking
civil war with their fanaticism....Instead
of living at peace within the bosom of the
Republic, which had provided for their subsistence,
and instead of obeying the laws, adopted the
idea of residing together in this same house...and
of making this house a refuge for refractory
priests and counter-revolutionary fanatics,
with whom they plotted against the Revolution
and against the eternal principles of liberty
and equality which are its basis.
Apparently the nuns, whom he called criminal
assassins, were corrupted by the ex-Jesuit
Rousseau de Roseicquet, who led them in a
conspiracy to poison minds and subvert the
Republic.
When the judge read this piece of Fouquier-Tinville's
prose, he condemned them to be deported, as
well as all those who had given them refuge.
=== Downfall ===
His career ended with the fall of Robespierre
at the start of the Thermidorian Reaction.
Although he was briefly kept as the new government's
prosecutor, even helping in the arrest of
Robespierre, Louis de Saint-Just, and Georges
Couthon, and being confirmed by Bertrand Barère
de Vieuzac and the Convention on 28 July 1794,
he was arrested after being denounced by Louis-Marie
Stanislas Fréron.Imprisoned on 1 August,
he was brought to trial in front of the Convention.
His defense was that he had only obeyed the
decrees of the Committee of Public Safety
and the Convention:
It is not I who ought to be facing the tribunal,
but the chiefs whose orders I have executed.
I had only acted in the spirit of the laws
passed by a Convention invested with all powers.
Through the absence of its members [on trial],
I find myself the head of a [political] conspiracy
I have never been aware of.
Here I am facing slander, [facing] a people
always eager to find others responsible.
After a trial lasting forty-one days, he was
sentenced to death and guillotined on 7 May
1795, together with 15 former functionaries
of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who were sentenced
as his accomplices.
=== Personal life ===
Fouquier-Tinville married his first wife,
Geneviève-Dorothée Saugnier, with whom he
would have five children, in 1775.
He was widowed seven years later.
Four months after his wife's death, he married
Henriette Jeanne Gérard d'Arcourt, with whom
he would spend the rest of his life.
They had three children together.
== See also ==
Charlotte Corday
Marie Antoinette
Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine and his son,
Girondist leadershipJacques Pierre Brissot
Jean-Marie Roland, vicomte de la Platière
and Madame RolandDantonistsGeorge Danton
Marie Jean Hérault de Séchelles
Marquis de Condorcet
Pierre Philippeaux,
Camille DesmoulinsAntoine Barnave,
Jacques Hébert and his supporters, as well
as that of the Maximilien Robespierre.
== Fiction and Film ==
Fouquier was played by Roger Planchon in Andrzej
Wajda's film Danton (1983).
Public Prosecutor in the opera Andrea Chenier
by Umberto Giordano.
== Sources
