Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne

Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne (; 14 November 1743 – 5 December 1793) was a leader of the French Protestants and a moderate French revolutionary.

Biography

Jean-Paul Rabaut was born in 1743 in Nîmes, in Languedoc (now in the department of Gard), the son of Désert preacher Paul Rabaut. The additional surname of Saint-Étienne was assumed from a small property near Nîmes. His brothers were Jacques Antoine Rabaut-Pommier and Pierre-Antoine Rabaut-Dupuis, both also politically active.

Like his father, he became a Calvinist pastor, and distinguished himself with his zeal for his co-religionists, After more than a century of prohibition, the Edict of Tolerance significantly expanded upon the rights afforded to Calvinists. Rabaut Saint-Étienne also wrote a letter in response to this Edict, in which he proposed a number of potential alterations.

Full religious freedom had to wait two more years for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, but the 1787 Edict of Tolerance was a pivotal step in subduing religious strife, and it officially ended religious persecution in France.

Having gained a reputation with his Histoire primitive de la Grèce, Rabaut de Saint-Étienne was elected deputy to the Estates-General of 1789 by the third estate of the bailliage of Nîmes. In the Convention, he sat among the Girondists, opposed the trial of Louis XVI,

was a member of the Commission of Twelve, which conducted an investigation into the Commune of Paris,

He was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and sentenced to death that very day. His brother was imprisoned.

He remained in hiding for some time, but he was ultimately discovered and guillotined by the radical revolutionary government in December 1793.