Barnave, Antoine

Born Sept. 21, 1761, in Grenoble; died Nov. 29, 1793, in Paris. A figure of the Great French Revolution. A sociologist.

Barnave was a deputy to the Constituent Assembly from 1789 to 1791 and a partisan of the constitutional monarchy. After H. Mirabeau’s death in 1791, Barnave became a leader of the Feuillants with A. J. F. Duport and A. Lameth. In his speech on July 15, 1791, Barnave called for a halt to the revolution. He was executed during the Jacobin dictatorship. Under the influence of the ideas of C. Montesquieu and the physiocrats, Barnave developed in his work Introduction to the French Revolution (1792, published 1843) the idea of the influence of geographical factors on the formation of a political system effected by the economy: the evolution of economic forms leads to a redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to a redistribution of power. Barnave’s ideas played an important role in the preparation of C. Saint-Simon’s philosophy of history and the ideas of the historians during the restoration.