Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725-1811)

Description

A captain of industry before his time, he was adulated by the privileged few who were fond of his vellum paper - he owned the royal wallpaper factory - and respected by the workers he was able to help in times of extreme cold. He was also friends with the Montgolfiers, whose first aerostats he produced - reminiscent of the flaming cauldron above the Tuileries at the recent Olympic Games... Yet history has only remembered Jean-Baptiste Réveillon (1725-1811) for the 'affair' that bears his name and that plunged working-class Paris into mourning on the eve of the French Revolution, when, in April 1789, he was wrongly accused of trying to lower workers' wages and the uprising in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was put down in bloodshed by royal troops.
Having disappeared from the public eye after the sale of his factory in 1792, Réveillon, far from having become poor, made a career change by opting for land rent. His Exposé justificatif reveals the image of an English-style entrepreneur, shrewd and at the same time concerned for the well-being of his employees. The Rousseauist overtones of his speech cannot, however, mask the concerns of the businessman, who was battered by the crisis before being overtaken by popular anger.
In this book, we have chosen to use his story as the starting point for an analysis that examines the grey areas and reveals the man and his story, both before and after the bloody outburst that also changed the course of history.