TALLIEN, JEAN LAMBERT, a French revolutionist, was born at Paris in 1769, and first became notable in the beginning of 1792 as the editor of a Jacobin journal, called .L'Ami des Ciloyens, meant to be a friendly rival of karat's Ami du Peuple. From this date his influence over the lower orders of the city steadily increased. He was conspic xous in the events of August 10, and in consequence received the appointment of secretary to the Commune Insurrectionelle. He promoted and afterward defended the massacres of September; and on account of his unscrupulous zeal, was elected to the convention by the department of Seine•et-Oise. There he became the apologist if not the advocate of karat, denounced the minister Roland, urged with savage emphasis the condemnation of Louis XVI., and was rabidly eager for the ostracism and annihilation of the Girondists (q.v.). Toward the close of 1793 he was sent to Bordeaux, charged with the mission of destroying every trace of the party he hated. His career in the siouth-west was a mixture of reckless cruelty and shameful vice. To the odious tyran nies of a proconsul he added the luxurious profligacy of a satrap. Fortunately for his countrymen, a passion which be conceived for one of his victims, Madame de Fontenay (nee Cabarrus), led him to pause in his bloody course. He was called to Paris to account for this singular change in his disposition, satisfied his associates (by par oxysms of patriotic vehemence) that it meant nothing particular, and on March 22, 1794, was chosen president of the convention. Robespierre, however, had found out the sort of man that Tallien was. He hated him for his insincerity and immorality, felt instinctively that be could not be trusted, denounced him severely in the conven tion, and on June 14 got his name erased from the list of members at the Jacobins.
Tallien recognized his danger, and taking advantage of the reaction against the ter rorists (though himself one of the basest of the set), already beginning to show itself in France, he dexterously rallied the Dantonists, Hebertists, and others against the rigor ous government of Robespierre, St. Just, and Couthon, and brought about the events of the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), which caused the fall of the triumvirate. Tallien now became for a short time one of the most notable and influential men in France; lent his aid to suppress the revolutionary tribunal and Jacobin club, and drew up the accusations against Carrier, Le Bon. and others of the te, But France could not long tolerate this affectation of virtue on the part of one zo infamous; his past life was perpetually held up to scorn and reproach; and finally, on May 20,1798, he was forced to leave the council of five hundred. Henceforth his career is pitiably insignificant. He accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt as savant (!), quarreled with gen. Menou, and on his return to France, was captured by an English cruiser, and brought to England, where the whig opposition was stupid enough to make a hero of him (1801). Soon after he returned to France, and was contemptuously dismissed as consul to Alicante by Talleyrand, outlived (in" utter obscurity) the empire of Napoleon, and died at Paris, Nov. 16,1820, supported in his last days by the heirs of the monarch for whose death he had inhumanly clamored.