Convocation of the French States-General (1789–1791) Seduced at first by the new ideas of the Revolution, he threw himself into a political career by becoming an aristocratic member of the
bailliage of Melun in 1789. He was elected secretary of this assembly, under its president M. de Gouy d'Arcy, of Melun, a fellow member of the famous explorer
Louis Antoine de Bougainville. The Assembly was assigned the task of drawing up a list of grievances to be submitted to the King and naming a deputy to the States-General. Vaublanc supported
Fréteau de Saint-Just, an elected for the of Melun who was to become a member of the
National Constituent Assembly. In 1790, Vaublanc became a member and later president of the
conseil général of
Seine-et-Marne. This gave him the right to preside over the administrative directory of this ''''.
Losing ground to the Jacobins under the Legislative Assembly (1791) After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the electoral colleges reconvened to elect new deputies. Vaublanc was elected president of that of Seine-et-Marne. On 1 September 1791, he was elected deputy of Seine-et-Marne at the Legislative Assembly, the eighth out of eleven, by 273 votes out of 345. He was one of the few to have any political experience, notably on the question of the
Antilles, in an assembly composed essentially of political novices. Faithful to their promises, not one former member of the Constituent Assembly had been admitted.
A leader of the Club des Feuillants (1791–1792) From this point on, he took the name of Viénot-Vaublanc, which he retained until the end of the
First Empire in 1814. From the very moment of his appearance, he made himself conspicuous by delivering a speech which denounced the humiliating terms on which
Louis XVI was to be received by the Assembly the next day. As a result of these statements, he was elected president from 15 November to 28 November 1791 by the assembly, the majority of whom were royalist. On 29 November, Vaublanc was assigned the task of composing a message to the King, asking him to withdraw his veto of the decree of 9 November, a decree designed to slow the massive emigrations (then encouraged by the priests and the nobility) by threatening reprisals against German princes who continued to offer refuge to the armies of French noblemen (such as those of the
Comte d'Artois, and of the
Prince of Condé). The assembly was so pleased with his work that they asked him to read it to the King personally. Louis XVI replied that he would take the request into serious consideration, and, several days later, personally announced his decision on the matter. On this occasion Vaublanc made a name for himself by informing the assembly "that the King had made the first bow, and he had only returned the gesture." The anecdote reveals the shift in constitutional forces: the legislative power, embodied in the Legislative Assembly, was clearly ascendant over the executive, embodied in Louis XVI, who was now no more than the "King of the French" or . Vaublanc now sided with the constitutional monarchists and joined the (dubbed the
Club des Feuillants) with 263 other colleagues out of the 745 deputies. He became one of its principal figures, along with
Jacques Claude Beugnot,
Mathieu Dumas and
Jaucourt, after the departure of
Barnave and
C. Lameth. 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. Debate became steadily more extreme. The crowds attending these debates often shouted at him (as they did at
Charles de Lacretelle) "
À la lanterne!"
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."
Brissot, one of the chief
Girondists in the Legislative Assembly, nicknamed him
bicaméristes.
The fall of the monarchy (1792) In 1792, he defended the
Comte de Rochambeau before the Assembly and obtained his acquittal. 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. He supported the law of 4 April 1792 which granted citizenship to all "coloured men and free Negroes". At the meeting of 10 April, he declared himself in favour of the progressive abolition of the slave trade throughout the colonies, following the examples of Denmark and Great Britain. On 3 May 1792, he supported the proposition of
Beugnot which provoked an accusatory decree from
Marat and the abbé Royou, and on 8 May, at the Assembly, he addressed the Jacobins in these terms: "You wish, sirs, to save the Constitution; and yet, you cannot do so without beating down factions and the factious, without setting everything besides the rule of law to one side, without dying with the Law and for the Law, and I declare that I shall not be the last who shall die with you, in order to see it preserved; believe it, sirs...." On 18 June, he was elected a member of the (Committee of Twelve), created by Marat to examine the State of France and to propose means of preserving the Constitution, liberty, and the Empire. He gave his resignation on 30 July.
The defence of La Fayette Following the events of 20 June 1792,
La Fayette arrived in Paris on 28 June, hoping to convince the King to leave in order to head the armies assembled in the north. At the head of the National Guard, he tried to close down the political
clubs, but his attempt failed, partly because of the Court's refusal to support him. In reaction to this, the left wing of the Assembly decided to charge Lafayette with treason. On 8 August 1792, ill at ease and shocked by the course of events, Vaublanc delivered a speech before the Assembly, in which he defended, vigorously, and courageously, against the lively opposition of the Jacobins who dominated the Assembly and of the man in the street, General La Fayette, who stood accused of violating the Constitution. He later claimed to have succeeded (with the help of
Quatremère de Quincy) in rallying 200 undecided deputies to his position. La Fayette was acquitted, by 406 votes out of 630. On departure, Vaublanc and about thirty other deputies were threatened, insulted and jostled by the hostile crowd which had attended the debate. Some deputies even took refuge in the guardroom of the Royal Palace, later exiting through the windows.
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." As a result, on 9 August, Vaublanc asked for the removal of the and . The request was rejected by a majority of the Assembly.
10 August 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. He was one of the eyewitnesses of the arrival of the Royal Family, who, after the March on the
Tuileries, placed themselves under the protection of the Legislative Assembly at the . The incident is described in his memoirs.
Exiled during the Convention and the Reign of Terror (1792–1795) 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 the evening of 10 August he was obliged to take refuge at the home of Armand-Gaston Camus, the Assembly's archivist. Several days later he moved to the Hotel Strasbourg, on the rue Neuve Saint Eustache. 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. The
Committee of Public Safety, newly established, published a decree in which it was revealed that he was on the list of outlaws drawn up by the Municipality of Paris. This forced him to leave the city, first for
Normandy, where he reunited with his family, then for his country house at Bélombres near Melun. 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." The Law of Suspects went to the vote on 17 September 1793. His name appeared within. A revolutionary detachment came and ransacked his house, and he "fled by the highways" entirely on foot, throwing himself on the mercy of chance. He wandered from inn to inn, entering (he later wrote) every town in a terror of being recognised, especially when going to local authorities in order to get his passport stamped. At the trial of
Marie Antoinette, on 14 October and 16 October 1793, his name appeared next to that of
Jaucourt in the papers of the prosecutors. 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. He passed through
Poitiers, and
La Rochelle, where he stayed for one month. Wishing to avoid taking the risk of enlisting in the National Guard, where he could well be recognised, he feigned illness and obtained a medical certificate which would allow him to take a thermal cure at Castéra-Verduzan in the
Gers region. To allay suspicions, he took the precaution of regularly pricking his gums in order to simulate "incurable
scurvy." It was while at this spa that he learnt of the fall of
Robespierre on 27 July 1794. He waited four months for his proscription to be lifted before returning to Paris.
A counterrevolutionary activist under the Directory (1795–1799) On his return to Paris in the spring of 1795, he published his "Reflections on the foundations of a constitution" (), under the pseudonym of L.-P. de Ségur, tabled by his friend
Bresson, then a deputy at the National Convention. In this work, he advocated the creation of two parliamentary chambers instead of one (as was the case under the Convention), in the belief that having only one chamber had been one of the causes of the
Terror. He also advocated the installation of a single person as head of the Executive, for the sake of efficiency, as opposed to the Directory's five. 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. His ideas were nevertheless broadly followed, and two chambers representing the Legislature saw the light of day with the names "
Council of Ancients (Elders)" and "
Council of Five Hundred" ( and ). 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 this occasion, he discovered the tactical genius of Bonaparte, who became known as . He was a member of the central royalist committee entrusted with replacing the Convention. 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. This obliged him to go into hiding for a second time, mostly at the residence of Sophie Cottin, a friend of
Bresson's wife. He took advantage of his stay there by making sketches of Cottin. Several days later, the Convention, forced to hold new elections, assembled the electoral colleges. This election brought a majority of royalists into the Senate and into the Council of 500. 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). This was made easier because of the fear inspired in the Assembly by at the end of August 1796. On 2 September 1796, he delivered the famous speech "I swear hatred for royalty!" which, according to legend, was interrupted by a highlander who shouted "Speak up!" — to which Vaublanc responded instantly: "Keep it down!" The elections of Year V (May 1797), in which one third of the representatives were replaced, turned the tables in favour of the royalists, who achieved a majority in both chambers. On 20 May 1797 (20 prairial V),
Charles Pichegru was elected president of the Council of 500 and Barbé-Marbois of the Council of Elders. Vaublanc himself was named of the Council of 500. 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. Vaublanc voted against his nomination, preferring General
Beurnonville, who was known for his forcefulness. The new majority supported freedom of the press, which allowed attacks on the Directory to be made with impunity. The
Club de Clichy, of which Vaublanc was a prominent member, began to control the two councils, and directly threatened the Directory. He was appointed to their committee of inspectors, and given the rôle of policing the councils and maintaining their security from within. As a result, he had the power to give orders to the councils' brigadiers. The Directory, cornered, counterattacked with the 80,000-strong army of Sambre-et-Meuse, which approached Paris under the command of Hoche. At the same time, Vaublanc pleaded for and obtained from the Council an order dissolving all clubs, including those of the Jacobins. On 16 July 1797, under pressure from the councils, the three republican directors, Barras, Reubell and La Reveillière-Lépeaux, ordered a ministerial reshuffle disadvantaging the royalists. On 3 September, Vaublanc, with his colleague Admiral Louis Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse and other , was a hair's breadth from achieving a
coup d'état against the triumvirate of republican directors. Their plan, which convinced the director
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot, was simple. Vaublanc was charged with delivering a speech on 4 September before the Council of 500 which would demand the impeachment of the triumvirate. Meanwhile, General
Pichegru, who had been persuaded by Carnot to join the conspiracy at the head of the Legislature's Guard, would come to arrest the directors. 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. He sent General
Pierre Augereau and his army to Paris, where the general advertised the treason with posters in the streets. The principal conspirators were either arrested and deported to
Guyana (like Pichegru and Barthélémy), or forced to flee (like Carnot and Vaublanc). The latter managed to escape the city limits of Paris, which was then still in a state of siege, by hiding in a carriage. This escape was achieved through the connivance of Rochambeau. Vaublanc made it to Italy with the help of various disguises; on his way he passed through Switzerland, where he stayed with his friend Pastoret. ==Under Napoleon==