Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau (French: [miʁabo]; 9 March 1749 – 2 April 1791), known simply as Mirabeau, was a French writer, orator, and statesman, and a prominent figure of the early stages of the French Revolution.
A member of the nobility, Mirabeau had been involved in numerous scandals that had left his reputation in ruins. Well-known for his oratory skills, Mirabeau quickly rose to the top of the French political hierarchy following his election to the Estates-General in 1789, and was recognized as a leader of the newly organized National Assembly. Among the revolutionaries, Mirabeau was an advocate of the moderate position of constitutional monarchy modelled after that of Great Britain. He was also a leading member of the Jacobin Club.
Mirabeau died of pericarditis in 1791 and was regarded as a national hero and a father of the Revolution. He received a grand burial and was the first to be interred at the Panthéon. During the 1792 trial of Louis XVI, the discovery that Mirabeau had secretly been in the pay of the king brought him into posthumous disgrace, and two years later his remains were removed from the Panthéon. Historians are split on whether Mirabeau was a great leader who almost saved the nation from the Terror, a venal demagogue lacking political or moral values, or a traitor in the pay of the enemy.
The family of Riqueti, with possible distant origins in Italy, became wealthy through merchant trading in Marseille. In 1570, Jean Riqueti bought the château and seigniory of Mirabeau, which had belonged to the great Provençal family of Barras. In 1685, Honoré Riqueti obtained the title "marquis de Mirabeau".
His son, Jean Antoine, grandfather of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, served with distinction through all the later campaigns of the reign of Louis XIV. At the Battle of Cassano (1705), he suffered a neck wound so severe that he had to wear a silver stock ever after. Because he tended to be blunt and tactless, he never rose above the rank of colonel. On retiring from the service, he married Françoise de Castellane, with whom he had three sons: Victor (marquis de Mirabeau), Jean Antoine (bailli de Mirabeau) and Louis Alexandre (comte de Mirabeau). Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, was the son of Victor.
Honoré-Gabriel Mirabeau was born at Le Bignon, near Nemours, the eldest surviving son of the economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and his wife Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. He was also the fifth child and second son of the couple. When he was three years old, a virulent attack of smallpox left his face disfigured. This, combined with Mirabeau's resemblance to his maternal ancestors and his fondness for his mother, contributed to his father's dislike of him. At the age of five, his father had him sent to the strict boarding school of Abbé Choquart in Paris by the false name of "Pierre-Buffière" after an estate possessed by his mother. Destined for the army, at age eighteen, he entered the military school in Paris in the regiment of Berri-Cavaleria at Saints. Of this school, which had Joseph-Louis Lagrange for its professor of mathematics, there is an amusing account in the life of Gilbert Elliot, who met Mirabeau there. On leaving school in 1767, he received a commission in a cavalry regiment that his grandfather had commanded years before.
Mirabeau's love affairs are well-known, owing to the celebrity of the letters to Marie Thérèse de Monnier, his "Sophie". In spite of his disfigurement (or perhaps because of it), he won the heart of the lady to whom his colonel was attached; this led to such scandal that his father obtained a lettre de cachet, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Île de Ré. On being released, the young nobleman obtained leave to accompany the French expedition to Corsica as a volunteer. During the Corsican expedition, Mirabeau contracted several more gambling debts and engaged in another scandalous love affair. However, he proved his military genius in the Corsican expedition, and also conducted a thorough study of the island during his stay. The study was most likely factually incorrect, but his desire to learn of a country that had been previously unstudied emphasizes Mirabeau's endless curiosity and inquisitiveness, particularly into the traditions and customs of society. Mirabeau learned the value of hard work in the French army. This aspect of Mirabeau's personality contributed to his popular success in later years, during the Revolution. After his return, he tried to keep on good terms with his father, and in 1772 he married a rich heiress, Marie–Marquerite–Emilie de Covet, daughter of the marquis de Marignane. Emilie, who was 18 years old, was apparently engaged to a much older nobleman, the Comte de Valbelle. Nonetheless, Mirabeau pursued her for several months, expecting that their marriage would benefit from the money that the couple would receive from their parents. After several months of failed attempts at being introduced to the heiress, Mirabeau bribed one of the young lady's maids to let him into her residence, where he pretended to have had a sexual encounter with Emilie. To avoid losing face, her father saw that they got married just a couple of days afterwards. Mirabeau received a small allowance of 6,000 livres from his father, but never received the expected dowry from the marquis.
Mirabeau, who was still facing financial trouble and increasing debt, could not keep up with the expensive lifestyle to which his wife was accustomed, and their extravagances forced his father to send him into semi-exile in the country, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le despotisme. The couple had a son who died early, mostly due to the poor living conditions they were experiencing at that time.
Mirabeau's violent disposition led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Château d'If in 1774. In 1775 he was transferred to the castle of Joux, where he was not closely confined, having full leave to enter the town of Pontarlier. In a house of a friend he met Marie Thérèse de Monnier, known as "Sophie", and the two fell in love. He escaped to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to the United Provinces, where he lived by writing hack work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for sedition and abduction, and in May 1777 he was seized by the Dutch police, sent to France and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes.
The early part of his confinement is marked by indecent letters to Sophie (first published in 1793 by Pierre Louis Manuel), and the obscene Erotica biblion and Ma conversion. In Vincennes, he met the Marquis de Sade, who was also writing erotic works; however the two disliked each other intensely. It was in these writings, however, that Mirabeau developed experience as an orator. He learned how to curb his natural loquacity and his rhetoric became firm, commanding and moving. The prison in which he was held was the first platform to hear his voice. Later during his confinement, he wrote Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état, published after his liberation (1782). It exhibits an accurate knowledge of French constitutional history, skillfully marshaled to demonstrate that the system of lettres de cachet was not only philosophically unjust but constitutionally illegal. It shows, though in a rather diffuse and declamatory form, wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence, applied to a practical purpose, which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman.
His wife asked for judicial separation in 1782. She was defended by Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, who later became one of the editors of the Civil Code. Mirabeau defended his own cause in this trial but lost, holding resentment against Portalis forever.
His release from Vincennes in August 1782 began the second period of Mirabeau's life. Mirabeau not only succeeded in reversing the sentence of death against him, but also got an order for Sophie's husband to pay the costs of the whole legal proceedings. It was thought Mirabeau would come out of the lawsuit in Aix ruined: his past convictions in prison, scandalous relationships with women, and the bad relationship with his father the Marquis all gave him a terrible reputation among judges and adversaries. However, despite being condemned by the judge, his reputation was greatly enhanced in the eyes of the public. He had withered his opponents, crushed the opposing lawyer and turned the cards in his favor regarding the death sentence. From this day forward, Mirabeau became regarded as a man of the people. Upon his release, he found that his Sophie had consoled herself with a young officer, after whose death she had committed suicide. From Pontarlier he went to Aix-en-Provence, where he claimed the court's order said that his wife should return to him. She naturally objected, and he finally lost in the third appeal of the case when Emilie's father produced to the court compromising letters from Mirabeau addressed to the marquess. Mirabeau then intervened in the suit between his father and mother before the parlement of Paris and attacked the ruling powers so violently that he had to leave France and return to the Dutch Republic, where he tried to live by writing. For a period he was employed by the publisher Marc-Michel Rey.