GORSAS, ANTOINE JOSEPH French pub licist and politician, son of a shoemaker, was born at Limoges (Haute-Vienne) on March 24, 1752. He set up an army school at Versailles. In 1781 he was imprisoned in the Bicetre on an accu sation of corrupting the morals of his pupils, his real offence being the writing of satirical verse. At the opening of the states-gen eral he published the Courrier de Versailles a Paris et de Paris a Versailles, in which appeared on Oct. 4, 1789, the account of the banquet of the royal bodyguard. He continued his incendiary propaganda in the Courrier des quatre-vingt-trois departements. During the September massacres he wrote that the prisons were the centre of an anti-national conspiracy and that the people exercised a just vengeance on the guilty. On Sept. 1o, 1792 he was elected to the Convention (Seine-et-Oise). He sat at first with the Moun tain, but his agreement with the Girondists became gradually more pronounced; during the trial of Louis XVI. he voted for the king's detention during the war and subsequent banishment. An attack on Marat in the Courrier led to a raid on his printing establishment on March 9, '793, but he escaped to Normandy to join Buzot, and after the defeat of the Girondists at Pacy-sur-Eure he found shelter in Brittany. The Convention passed a resolution forbidding representatives to engage in journalism. On June 2 he was ordered by the Convention to hold himself under arrest. He was imprudent enough to return to Paris in the autumn, where he was arrested on Oct. 6, and guillotined the next day.
See the Moniteur, No. 268 (1792) , Nos. 2o, 70 new series 18 (1793) M. Tourneux, Bibl. de l'hist. de Paris, 10,291 seq. (1894).