Notes on the French Revolution, 15 January 1793
Notes on the French Revolution
1793. Jan. 15. M. Blacon, member from Dauphiné, of the 1st. National assembly of France is now1 here. He was one of those who met at my house in Paris when the Monarchical patriots (afterwards called Feuillants) and the Republican patriots (afterwards called Jacobins) were2 about to form a schism. At a dinner at Mr. Hammond’s to-day he recalls to my mind the names of all the members of both parties who met, to wit, la Fayette, Duport, Barnave, Alexr. La Meth, Blacon, Mounier, Maubourg, and Dagout. The result of that conference was that they made mutual sacrifices of opinion, and prevented the schism. The Republicans gave up their opposition to a king, the Monocrats theirs to a single branch of legislature.
MS (DLC); entirely in TJ’s hand; written on same sheet as “Anas” entries for 13 and 17 Dec. 1792 and 16 Jan. 1793. Recorded in SJPL under 15 Jan. 1793: “Blacon on the caucus at my house in Paris.” Included in the “Anas.”
Henri François Lucrecius d’Armand de Forest, Marquis de Blacons, a liberal member of the Estates General in 1789 who thereafter became progressively more royalist in his political views, left France, apparently in 1792, and did not return until 1801 (Jean François Eugène Robinet and others, eds., Dictionnaire Historique et Biographique de La Révolution et de L’Empire, 1789–1815, 2 vols. [Paris, 1899], i, 195–6). For a fuller account of the meeting at TJ’s house in Paris, see Lafayette to TJ, [25 Aug. 1789], and note.
1. Word interlined.
2. Word written over “agreed.”