Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, vicomte de Barras

Paul-François-Jean-Nicolas, vicomte de Barras (born June 30, 1755, Fox-Amphoux, France—died January 29, 1829, Chaillot) was one of the most powerful members of the Directory during the French Revolution.

A Provençal nobleman, Barras volunteered as gentleman cadet in the regiment of Languedoc at the age of 16 and from 1776 to 1783 served in India. A period of unemployment in Paris left Barras disenchanted with the royal regime, and he welcomed the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. He entered the Jacobin Club almost immediately after it was founded and returned to the département of Var in 1791 to make himself eligible for election to the Legislative Assembly. Although his fierce electoral campaign failed to gain him election to the Assembly itself, he was made an elector from Var.

In September 1792 Barras returned to Paris, where he was elected deputy to the National Convention. Sent to supervise the French army of Italy, his first mission was to liberate Var and Nice from royalist forces and to organize the new département of Alpes-Maritimes. After voting for the king’s death, he was sent to conquer anti-Jacobin forces at Toulon, where his successful campaign gained him new prominence in the Convention and where he first met Napoleon Bonaparte.

During the Reign of Terror of 1794, Barras refused to align himself with any particular group. Nevertheless, he shrewdly reasserted himself in the coup of 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794), acting as one of the key figures in the overthrow of the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, and he emerged as the commander of the Army of the Interior and the police. His fame and power quickly increasing, he held a number of high-level positions in the Convention and in the Committee of Public Safety between the summer of 1794 and the autumn of 1795, by which time he had helped crush a revolt of the Parisian populace, aggravated antiroyalist attacks in the Convention, and begun an affair with Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s future wife.

Renamed general of the Army of the Interior on 13 Vendémiaire, year IV (October 5, 1795), he and Napoleon defended the regime against an attempted royalist insurrection and brought about the establishment of the Directory. By engineering the elections, Barras made himself one of the new directeurs, emerging as the most popular of the five. In 1796 he became actively involved with Le Cercle Constitutionnel, a group of antiroyalist liberals that included Talleyrand, Joseph Fouché, Benjamin Constant, and Madame de Staël, who supported the less republican and more authoritarian structure of the Directory. His lavish lifestyle made him a symbol of the regime’s corruption.

The coup of 18 Fructidor, year V (September 4, 1797), a purge of royalists in the Assembly, brought Barras to the apex of his power, but he fell from power in Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799). He was placed under the constant surveillance of Fouché’s spy network, and Napoleon’s suspicion of his conspiratorial activities brought about his exile to Brussels between 1801 and 1805, when he was permitted to return to southern France. When Napoleon learned of his secret meetings there with the former Spanish king Charles IV, he sent him to Rome in 1813. Barras may have contacted Louis XVIII even before 18 Brumaire; in any event, after the Second Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1815) the king permitted him to live in peace at his estate at Chaillot. His Mémoires was published in four volumes in 1895–96.