, BARPRE DE VIEUZAC, BERTRAND, a member of the French national convention, b. at Tarbes, l0ilt Sept., 1755. He became an advocate in the court at Toulouse. After acting as a deputy in the national assembly, the department of the Hantes-Pyrenees elected him to the national convention in 1792. He is said to have been naturnlly in favor of moderate measures, but he was easily overawed by the influence of the party of the mountain, with whom he generally acted and whom he supported by his eloquence, which was so flowery and poetical in style that he came to be designated the Anacreon of the guillotine. Ile was president of the convention when the sentence was passed upon Louis XVI. Ile rejected the appeal to the people, and gave his vote with these words: " The law is for death, and I tun here only as the organ of the law." His natu ral mildness, warring with the instinct of self-preservation, made him alternately a sup porter of merciful measures and an advocate of the guillotine, and his whole public conduct betokens a man much more selfish than patriotic or humane. After the death of Robespierre, in which he had concurred, B. nevertheless proposed the continuation
of the rovolutiouary tribunal, for which he was denounced by Lecointre and afterwards impeached an i sentenced to transportation; his sentence, however, was not carried into effect, and he partook of the general amnesty of the 18th Brumaire. He was elected as a deputy to the chamber in 1815, during the hundred days. After the second restoration he was banished from France and went to Brussels, where he devoted himself to literary work till the revolution of July permitted his return. In the year 1832 he was once more elected as a deputy by the department of the Hautes-Pyrenees; his election, however, was annulled, on account of errors of form, whereupon the government called him to he a member of the administration of that department, which office he continued to hold till 1840. He died on 14th Jan., 1841. He bestowed upon the younger Carnot his 3Thnoiree, which have been published (2 vols. Par. 1842). His many other political and historical writings are now of no importance.