|portrait of Barère by Jean-Louis Laneuville|
|Deputy for the Third Estate of the Estates-General
Constituency of Bigorre
6 May 1789 – 17 June 1789
|Deputy to the National Convention|
20 September 1792 – 27 July 1794
|Member of the Committee of Public Safety|
7 April 1793 – 27 July 1794
10 September 1755|
|Died||13 January 1841
|Political party||Feuillants Club (1791–1792)
Jacobin Club (1792–1795)
|The Gironde (1791–1793)
The Mountain (1793–1795)
|Profession||Lawyer, journalist and politician|
Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (10 September 1755 – 13 January 1841) was a French politician, freemason, journalist, and one of the most notorious members of the National Convention during the French Revolution.
He was born at Tarbes in Gascony. The name Barère de Vieuzac, by which he continued to call himself long after the renunciation of feudal rights on the 4 August abolition of feudalism, came from a small fief belonging to his father, a lawyer at Vieuzac. Barère's father, Jean Barère, was a procurator and a lawyer. Barère’s mother, Jeanne-Catherine Marrast, was of old nobility. When Barère was a child, he went to a parish school, and when he and his siblings were of age, his brother, Jean-Pierre, became a priest. After finishing school, Barère attended a college before he began his career in revolutionary politics. He began to practice as a lawyer at the parlement of Toulouse in 1770, and soon earned a reputation as an orator, while his fame as an essayist led to his election as a member of the Academy of Floral Games of Toulouse in 1788.
He married at the age of thirty. Four years later (1789), he was elected deputy by the estates of Bigorre to the Estates-General — he had made his first visit to Paris in the preceding year. Barère de Vieuzac at first belonged to the constitutional party, but he was less known as a speaker in the National Constituent Assembly than as a journalist. His paper, the Point du Jour, according to François Victor Alphonse Aulard, owed its reputation not so much to its own qualities as to the fact that the painter Jacques-Louis David, in his sketch of the Tennis Court Oath, showed Barère kneeling in the corner and writing a report of the proceedings for posterity.
With the Girondists and The Mountain
After the flight of the king to Varennes, Barère joined the republican party and the Feuillants, although he continued to keep in touch with the Duke of Orléans, whose natural daughter, Pamela, he tutored. After the Constituent Assembly ended its session, he was nominated one of the judges of the newly instituted Cour de cassation from October 1791 to September 1792.
Even though Barère was States-General in 1789 and judge of Constituent Assembly in 1791, his real career didn't begin until 1792, when he was elected to the National Convention for the département of the Hautes-Pyrénées. He participated to the Constitution Committee that drafted the Girondin constitutional project and also became a member of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793. It turned out that Barère was extremely useful in reporting to the Convention the plans of the Committee. His career took off when he presided over the trial of Louis XVI — Barère was the presiding officer in the National Convention and he was the one who questioned the king. He voted with The Mountain for the king's execution "without appeal and without delay", and closed his speech with a memorable sentence: “the tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.”
Appointed to the Committee of Public Safety on 7 April 1793, he became involved in foreign affairs, and joined Robespierre's faction, the Jacobin Club, playing an important part in the second Committee of Public Safety after 17 July 1793. He voted for the death of the Girondists at the beginning of the Reign of Terror. He consequently became active in the power struggles between The Mountain and others, and became mediator to all.
After the execution of King Louis XVI, Barère began publicly speaking of his newfound faith in "la religion de la patrie". He wanted everyone to have faith in the fa