Jacques Hébert

Jacques René Hébert ( French: [ʒak ʁəne ebɛʁ]; 15 November 1757 – 24 March 1794) was a French journalist and a prominent figure of the French Revolution. The founder and editor of the radical newspaper Le Père Duchesne, he was the chief spokesman for the Parisian sans-culottes. He and his followers, known as the Hébertists, played a major role in ushering in some of the most radical measures of the revolutionary period that culminated in the Reign of Terror.

Born in Alençon into a bourgeois family, Hébert was brought to ruin by a lawsuit and fled to Paris in 1780, where he lived in destitution for nearly a decade. At the outbreak of the revolution he found success as a pamphleteer, and in 1790 he founded Le Père Duchesne, a newspaper noted for its provocative tone and ribald language that enjoyed immense popularity and widespread circulation among the Parisian working class. Hébert initially advocated in favour of a constitutional monarchy, focusing his attacks on the aristocracy and clergy. Following Louis XVI's failed flight to Varennes, he became violently critical of the monarchy as well. A member of the Cordeliers club, Hébert supported the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 and the September Massacres, and through his vitriolic rhetoric he played an active role in the fall of the Girondins in mid-1793.