Jean-Baptiste-Robert Lindet

Jean-Baptiste-Robert Lindet (born 1743, Bernay, Fr.—died Feb. 17, 1825, Paris) was a member of the Committee of Public Safety that ruled Revolutionary France during the period of the Jacobin dictatorship (1793–94). He organized the provisioning of France’s armies and had charge of much of the central economic planning carried out by the committee.

At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, Lindet was a well-to-do lawyer in Bernay. He was elected to the Revolution’s Legislative Assembly (October 1791–September 1792) and accepted a seat in the Assembly’s successor, the National Convention. During the trial of King Louis XVI, Lindet drafted a report on Louis’s counterrevolutionary “crimes” (December 1792) and voted with the majority of the deputies for the king’s death (January 1793). He became a member of the first Committee of Public Safety on April 6, 1793. Siding with the Montagnards (deputies from the Club of the Jacobins), he proclaimed that strict economic controls had to be imposed if the republic was to survive in its war with the major European powers. He helped the Montagnards expel their moderate Girondist rivals from the Convention on June 2, and on July 10 he was reelected to the second, predominantly Jacobin, Committee of Public Safety.

In October Lindet assumed direction of the Central Food Committee, which was to requisition food and military supplies for the troops. Soon the efficient bureaucratic apparatus he set up was regulating much of the production and distribution of agricultural and industrial goods. Nevertheless, he remained essentially a moderate. He looked forward to the eventual elimination of controls, disapproved of the use of terror against counterrevolutionaries, and showed little sympathy for the demands of the Parisian lower classes. Although he frequently supported the opponents of the committee’s chief spokesman, Robespierre, he took no part in the conspiracy that brought about Robespierre’s downfall on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794). During the ensuing Thermidorian reaction against the Jacobin regime, Lindet withdrew from the Committee of Public Safety (October 1794). He was appointed minister of finance under the Directory in June 1799, but he retired from politics when Napoleon seized power in November. Lindet spent the rest of his life practicing law in Paris.