Pierre-François Tissot

Pierre François Tissot (20 March 1768 – 7 April 1854) was a French man of letters and politician.

Tissot was born in Versailles to a native of Savoy, who was a perfumer appointed by royal warrant to the court. At the age of eighteen he entered the service of a solicitor of the Châtelet, in order to learn the practice of the law, but he was more attracted to literature, and, as a handsome youth, was occasionally invited to the fêtes of the Petit Trianon.

Tissot devoted himself to the cause of the French Revolution, in spite of the fact that it had ruined his family. While with the solicitor he had made the acquaintance of Alexandre Goujon, and they soon became close friends - he married Goujon's sister, Sophie (on 5 March 1793), and when his brother-in-law was elected deputy to the National Convention and sent as a representative-on-mission to the Revolutionary Armies of the Moselle and Rhine, Tissot went with him as his secretary. He then returned to Paris and resumed his more modest position of Secrétaire Général des Subsistences.

On the insurrection of Prairial 1 1795 (carried out against the Thermidorian Reaction), he tried in vain to save Goujon, who had been involved in the proscription of the "last Montagnards"; all he could do was to give Goujon the knife with which he killed himself in order to escape the guillotine, and he afterwards avenged his memory in the Souvenirs de Prairial. He also took under his care Goujon's widow and children. His connection with the Jacobin party caused him to be condemned to deportation after the Plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise, but Napoleon Bonaparte, having been persuaded to read his translation of the Eclogues of Virgil, struck his name off the list.

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