Pierre Henri Hélène Marie Lebrun-Tondu

Pierre-Henri-Hélène-Marie Lebrun-Tondu (27 August 1754, Noyon – 27 December 1793, Paris) was a journalist and a French minister, during the French Revolution.

He was the son of Christophe Pierre Tondu, a well-to-do merchant also churchwarden of his parish, and Elisabeth Rosalie Lebrun. He was sent as a youngster as a student at College Louis-le-Grand, Paris, under benefit of a scholarship grant from the Chapter of Canons of Noyon, a common situation in such schools run by priests. Louis-le-Grand was attended during those years by such famous-to-be people as La Fayette (a shade older than Tondu-Lebrun was), Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins (both younger), and a bunch of others that played some role in the French Revolution as well (such as Feron, Noel...). However his family ran into financial trouble (reasons are not known) and he had to become a teacher at Louis-le-Grand, the which position required at that time to become some level of tonsured cleric; thus he was known under the name "Abbot Tondu"; he moved to be employed at the Observatory of Paris about in 1777, where he devoted himself to mathematics and observations until early 1779. Then, for two years, he was a soldier, before obtaining his leave. Involved in some unclear contestation of French politics, he was banned by Minister Baron de Vergennes and had to move in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège in 1781 under the name "Pierre Lebrun", he became a foreman at the printing shop of Jean-Jacques Tutot, where he soon became editor.

He married, in Liege on 28 July 1783, Marie-Jeanne Adrienne Cheret (as was written in French documents; some Belgian registers also write "Cherette"), who gave him seven children, out of which six grew to be adults:

In June 1785, he left Tutot and, with Jacques-Joseph Smits, started the Journal général d'Europe, based in Liege, a periodical favorable to new ideas that met with great success. Increasingly critical of the Prince-Bishop, he, in July 1786, installed the presses in the Austrian Netherlands, in Herve (Limburg), near Liege. Having acquired Liege citizenship, he was closely involved in politics and participated in the Liège Revolution in 1789, also writing the Journal of Patriotic Liège from 18 March to 4 July 1790. During that period he turned to radical views such were later on embodied by Girondins and early days Montagnards in Paris, and was linked to the more radical Liege activists.

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