A conspicuous figure all through the French Revolution, the Consulate, and the Empire, who thought in his simplicity that the salvation of France and the world at large depended on sound political institutions, in the drafting of which he spent his life; was born in Frèjus, of the bourgeois class; represented Paris in the States General; sat in the center in the Legislative Assembly; renounced the Christian religion in favour of the Goddess of Reason; projected a constitution which was rejected; supported Napoleon; fled to Belgium on the return of the Bourbons, and returned to France in 1830, by which time he was politically defunct (1748-1836).