REVOLUTION. MERCEREAU (b. circa 1758) stone mason, president - Lot 566

REVOLUTION. MERCEREAU (b. circa 1758) stone mason, president of the General Council of the Commune, watched over the royal family at the Temple. L.A.S., Paris 2 vendémiaire III (September 23, 1794), to Stanislas Fréron, deputy to the National Convention, at the office of the newspaper L'Orateur du peuple; 2 fol. pages, addressed. Curious protest against journalist and Conventionnel Pierre-Jean Audouin, known as "le Sapeur" (because he was a battalion sapper in the Section des Carmes at the start of the Revolution). He invites him to have a word with "le Sapeur des principes (Audouin)", who has taken the liberty of saying in his feuille that "cetoit un réchappé de prison, qui sétoit au dent la section du Panthéon français a lad'hesion de la prétendue adresse de la Société Populaire de Dijon". This same prison escapee foiled the plot of the defrocked Bach, Commissaire de Police, and helped draft the address of the French Pantheon Section presented to the Convention. "I was arrested for having had the courage to rise up against the vengeance of the Revolutionary Committee and the hermaphrodite Sectional Society of the Pantheon, in this tamp of pain, crime persecuted virtue [...].] But since the 9th of Thermidor, virtue has in turn pursued crime"... He sums up his career as a stonemason and municipal officer, president of the General Council of Paris from December 1792 to February 1793: "I was not ashamed of my state, but with my stone-cutter's thablier, my clogs and all my working clothes, I said to the sapper, that the prison escapee had never abandoned the people's cause"... And he concludes: "Courage, firmness, hatred for the Tirans and the Therorists, and the Republic will be saved"...