Jacques Garnier

Jacques Garnier, also called Garnier de Saintes, was born in Saintes on 30 March 1755, and drowned in the Ohio River in 1817 or 1818 was a French politician, a lawyer and a revolutionary.

A lawyer in Saintes in 1784, Jacques Garnier stood out from the beginning of the French Revolution by creating and chairing a committee to acquire wheat stocks and sell them at auction. He was Mayor of Saintes in 1790, general attorney of Charente, and he was elected deputy to the French National Convention by the department of Charente-Inférieure. As a member of the Jacobin Club, he aligned himself with the most radical of the Montagnards, whom he considered the faction of public salvation. Jacques Garnier was verbally violent, demanding that the Convention ban in perpetuity emigres of both genders, punishable by their executions if they return to France; this act, with modification, was known as the Law of Suspects. He maintained that Louis XVI should not be treated as accused, but as an enemy, and should be "sacrificed to security and justice." His public speeches, often incoherent, were always lengthy; he was forbidden the podium for twenty-four hours during the Trial of Louis XVI. After voting for the king's death, he joined the Committee of Public Safety, 25 March 1793.^[1] His exasperated colleagues dealt with his interminable interruptions and vitriol by sending him on a mission to the army of the coast at La Rochelle in late April 1793, where he enthusiastically pursued those he perceived as enemies of the revolution. He was therefore not involved in the elimination of Girondins.^[2]

While briefly in Paris, 7 August 1793, he proposed a declaration naming William Pitt as an "enemy of mankind". Responsible for organizing the revolutionary government in the Loir-et-Cher and the Sarthe in March and April 1794, he constantly encountered his colleagues, as well as during his time in Bordeaux. Having learned the fall of Maximilien Robespierre (27 July 1794 ), he was quick to denounce his colleague Marc Antoine Jullien as a "tool of Robespierre" but did not deny his own radical views. Inconsistently, though, he violently attacked the insurgents of the uprising of 12 Germinal Year III and the Insurrection of the 1st Prairial. He was representative of Mayenne in the Council of Five Hundred, and he endorsed the coup d'état of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797). In 1806, Napoleon named him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.^[2]

Exiled as a regicide in the Bourbon Restoration, in 1815 he moved with his son Simon to the United States, where he joined the Vine and Olive Colony of Bonapartists. In January 1817, when the colony moved to Marengo County, Alabama, on a plot established by an act of Congress in 1816, Garnier and his son remained in Kentucky. In 1818, Jacques Garnier and his son accidentally drowned in Ohio River when their steamboat sank.^[3]